

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




























































































































































































































































































































































































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GREAT BRITAIN. 

( Naval.) 





GREAT BRITAIN. 

( Merchant.) 




RUSSIA. 

(Naval.) 




CJ 



PORTUGAL. 



DENMARK. 
( Naval.) 





SPAIN. 

( Merchant.) 



SWITZERLAND. 


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EGYPT. 





TURKEY. 
( Naval.) 





PERSIA. 




BOLIVIA 


BRAZII 


■kssressw 


CHILI. 


URUGUAY. 


VENEZUELA. 





JAPAN. 



ECUADOR. 




PERU. 


































































































































































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4 





































THE 


Young Folks' Cyclopedia 


COMMON THINGS 



JOHN D. CHAMPLIN, Jr. 

LATE ASSOCIATE EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN CYCLOPAEDIA 


WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1879 


r 


AQsr 

/C ^69 



Copyright, 1879, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT & CO. 


THE S. W. GREEN 

Type-Setting Machines, 

NEW YORK. 


PREFACE. 


The Young Folks’ Cyclopaedia of Common Things has been 
prepared to fill a vacancy, the existence of which the writer be¬ 
lieves no unprejudiced person, will deny. Intelligent parents 
and teachers need not be told that one of the most important 
habits which can be cultivated in a child is that of consulting 
works of reference. There are dictionaries and atlases for the 
use of young folks, but unfortunately all the popular cyclopae¬ 
dias are written in language which a child cannot understand, 
and no attempt has been made, it is believed, previous to the 
publication of this work, to bring cyclopaedic knowledge within 
the range of a child’s intellect. Yet questions are almost con¬ 
tinually arising in the studies, and in the daily experience of 
youth, which such a cyclopaedia would answer without trouble 
to parents or teachers—to say nothing of numerous questions 
put by children, which many adults would find a difficulty in 
answering satisfactorily without reference to books. 

In the present work the writer has attempted to furnish in 
simple language, aided by pictorial illustrations where thought 
necessary, a knowledge of things in Nature, Science, and the Arts 
which are apt to awaken a child’s curiosity. Such features of 
Astronomy, Chemistry, Physics, Natural History, and Physiol¬ 
ogy as can easily be made intelligible are explained, special at¬ 
tention being given to the natural objects which most immediate¬ 
ly affect human happiness—such as the phenomena of air, light, 
heat, and electricity, and those parts of the human system whose 
health is influenced by our habits. Much attention has been 
given, too, to the description and explanation of the manufacture 
of articles in common use, and of the various processes con¬ 
nected with the Arts; while all the animals interesting from 



iv 


PREFACE. 


their domestic relation or as objects of curiosity have been 
treated as fully as the limits of the work will permit. If the 
writer has seemed in some instances to go beyond the scope of 
“ common things,” it is because he has preferred to err on the 
side of completeness rather than on that of omission. The 
scheme does not embrace any account of Persons or Places, 
as they would have added too much to the bulk of a single 
volume. 

The arrangement is the same as in other cyclopaedias, as the 
work is intended to be but a stepping-stone to the more com¬ 
prehensive ones for adults, and as it is deemed of importance 
to accustom the child early to the forms and methods which ex¬ 
perience has shown to be the best. It has been thought proper, 
however, to omit all abbreviations, and in most cases to put the 
scientific classifications and etymologies at the end instead of 
at the beginning of articles, where they will be less likely to 
destroy the continuity of the narrative, and to blunt the child’s 
interest. While it is not expected that the work will be made a 
text-book in any of the departments treated in it, it is yet hoped 
that both pupil and teacher may find it a valuable adjunct to 
all the more important studies pursued in school, and that it 
may be thought worthy of a place wherever a knowledge of 
common things is a necessity. 

A large number of works have been consulted and freely 
used, and the writer, without giving any extended enumeration 
of authorities, desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the 
following ones in particular: The American Cyclopaedia; 
Johnson’s Universal Cyclopaedia; The Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica; Chambers’ Encyclopaedia; Tomlinson’s Cyclopaedia of 
Useful Arts; Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and 
Mines; Goodholme’s Domestic Cyclopaedia; The Popular 
Science Monthly; Harper’s Magazine; Scribner’s Magazine; 
St. Nicholas; The Science Primers, edited by Professors Huxley, 
Roscoe, and Stewart; Holt’s Hand-books for Students and 
General Readers; Packard’s Guide to the Study of Insects; 
Hooker’s Child’s Book of Nature; and the works of Audubon, 
Wilson, Baird, Brewer, Agassiz, Storer, Huxley, and Figuier. 

Thanks are also due to the following firms for the loan of 
drawings and illustrations of the several articles manufac- 


PREFACE. 


V 


tured by them : Brewster & Co., of Broome Street, New York, 
Brown & Pray, New York, and H. Killam & Co., of New Haven, 
Conn., for carriages; Collins & Co., of Hartford, Conn., for 
axes; Fairbanks & Co., of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, for scales 
and weighing beams; Singer & Co., New York, for sewing- 
machines; Henry V. Allien & Co., New York, for shoulder- 
straps of Army and Navy; and the Pope Manufacturing Co., of 
Boston, for bicycle. 


New York, August i, 1879. 


J. D. C., Jr. 

















THE 


YOUNG FOLKS’ CYCLOPEDIA 

OF 

COMMON THINGS. 


Words printed in LETTERS LIKE THESE are explained in their alphabetical places. 

A 


ACID. In common language acid 
means sour ; but, though most acids 
are sour, there are some which are 
not, so this definition will not do for 
all acids. Acids are known to chem¬ 
ists by the way they act on colors 
got from plants. If a piece of litmus 
paper (paper dyed blue with the juice 
of a lichen called archil) be put 
into a liquid which has any acid in 
it, its blue color will be changed to 
red. If, then, another kind of liquid 
called an alkali be slowly turned 
into the acid liquid, the red of the 
litmus paper will fade away little by 
little, and after a while the blue 
color will come back again. Thus, 
acids and alkalies are the opposites 
of each other, for one will neutralize 
or kill the power of the other. 

Acids are found in the juices of 
plants and in animal bodies, and in 
many mineral substances. We know 
of several hundreds, and more are 
being found out all the time. In 
their common form some are gases, 
some liquids, and some solids. 
Acids are generally formed by the 
union of HYDROGEN, OXYGEN, and 
some one other element which is 
not a metal. For instance, acetic 
acid, which makes the sourness in 
vinegar, and citric acid, which 
makes the sourness in lemons and 
limes, are made up of hydrogen, 
oxygen, and CARBON, united in dif¬ 
ferent parts. Malic acid, found in 
unripe apples and most acid fruits, 


such as the gooseberry and currant; 
tartaric acid, found in grapes and 
many other plants ; oxalic acid, so 
useful for cleaning brass and copper 
and for taking ink stains and rust 
stains out of cloth ; and CARBONIC 
ACID, are other forms of the union 
of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. 
Carbolic acid, still another form of 
the union of the same things, smells 
like smoke. It is valuable as a puri¬ 
fier and for stopping the spread of 
disease. Carbolic soap is made out 
of it. Nitric acid is made up of 
hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, 
and SULPHURIC ACID of hydrogen, 
oxygen, and SULPHUR. 

There are some acids which have 
no oxygen in them. Among these 
are muriatic or hydrochloric acid, 
and prussic or hydrocyanic acid. 
Hydrochloric acid is so called be¬ 
cause it is made up of hydrogen and 
CHLORINE. The pure acid is a gas, 
the liquid commonly called muriatic 
acid being the gas mixed with water. 
A mixture of four parts of muriatic 
acid with one part of nitric acid is 
called aqua regia (Latin for royal 
water), because it is the only liquid 
which will dissolve gold, the king of 
metals. Muriatic acid is largely used 
in the arts. Hydrocyanic acid, so 
called because it is made up of hy¬ 
drogen and cyanogen (carbon and 
nitrogen), smells like bitter almonds 
and is a deadly poison. It is found 
in small quantities in bitter almonds, 





ACORN 


2 


vEOLIAN HARP 


in the kernels of peaches and of 
plums, and in peach leaves, giving 
them their peculiar taste. These 
things are sometimes used to flavor 
food with, there not being enough of 
the acid in them to do any harm. 
Common prussic acid, which is so 
called because it was first made from 
Prussian blue, is hydrocyanic acid 
mixed with water. 

Acids have many different powers 
and uses. While some are healthful 
and are used for food, others are 
deadly poisons when breathed into 
the lungs or taken into the stomach ; 
and while some are harmless to 
touch, others are very biting. Sul¬ 
phuric acid will char and destroy 
most vegetable and animal sub¬ 
stances, and nitric acid will make 
yellow stains and wounds where it 
touches the skin. In the article 
Base is told how the mixture of an 
acid and a base makes a salt. 

The word acid ns made from the 
Latin acidus, sour or sharp to the 
taste, which comes from acus, a 
needle. 

ACORN, the seed or fruit of the 
oak tree. Most kinds of acorns con¬ 
tain starch and oil, and have a 
bitter taste ; but some are not bitter, 
and are largely used as food in 
Spain, Algeria, and other Mediter¬ 
ranean countries, being liked better 
than chestnuts. In California the 
Indians pound up acorns in a mortar 


j and make cakes and mush out of the 
I meal. The cup of one kind of acorn 
5 is made into a fine black dye, and 
is also used, like bark, for tanning 
leather. 

The word acorn is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ac , oak, and corn, corn, grain. 

ADZE, a tool for smoothing tim¬ 
ber, much used by ship-carpenters. 
It has a handle like an axe, but the 
blade, which is made like a broad 
chisel, has the cutting edge crosswise 
instead of in a line with the handle. 

The adze is also used by house- 
carpenters in squaring timbers for the 
frames of buildings. The head of 
the common adze is shown in the 



Adze. 


picture. Another kind of adze, used 
in making wooden spouts and other 
hollow work, has the edge hollowed 
out like a gouge. Coopers’ adzes 
are much like the common adze, 
but have short handles, and are 
used in one hand like hatchets. 

The word adze is the modern form 
of the old English addice, which 
came from the Anglo-Saxon adese. 

AEOLIAN HARP, a box with 



Aeolian Harp. 


strings stretched tightly across it, I blows on them. The box is made 
which make music when the wind | of very thin boards, about five inches 




























































AGATE 


3 


AGAVE 


deep and six or eight inches wide, 
and usually just long enough to fit 
across a window. The strings, 
which may be of twisted silk, catgut, 
or wire, are stretched across the top 
of the box from end to end, and 
tuned together. When the harp is 
placed on the window sill and the 
window is raised just high enough 
to let the wind blow on the strings, it 
makes a sweet but sad kind of music. 

The iEolian harp is named from 
^olus, the ancient heathen god of 
the winds. 

AGATE, a kind of QUARTZ, 
marked with many colors in clouds, 
spots, or layers. Agates are found 
in loose rounded pieces inside of 
rocks, or as loose pebbles in beds of 
rivers or gravel. They vary usually 
from the size of a filbert to that of a 
small apple, but some have been 
found larger than a man’s head. 
Agates are made up mostly of silica 
(see Silicon), and the colors come 
from particles of iron mixed with it 
in different ways. When cut open 
they show a great many beautiful 
forms, in some the colors being in 
layers, in some in zig-zag lines, 
while in others they look like ani¬ 
mals, trees, moss, leaves, and other 
natural objects. In the British Mu¬ 
seum is a very remarkable agate 
from Egypt which shows on both 
sides a likeness of the poet Chaucer. 

As agates take a fine polish, they 
are much valued as ornamental 
stones. Most of the agates sold are 
brought from Oberstein, a small 
town near Mayence, Germany, 
where many of the inhabitants are 
employed in cutting and polishing 
them. They are first ground on 
large mill-stones turned by water 
wheels in small mills scattered along 
the banks of the river Nahe, and 
afterward polished on wheels of soft 
wood covered with powdered rot¬ 
ten stone. Agates are much used 
in the manufacture of rings, seals, 
beads, handles for knives and forks, 
sword hilts, cups, smelling bottles, 
and many other ornamental things. 


Burnishers for polishing, used by 
bookbinders and other mechanics, 
are also made of agate. 

The word agate is from the Latin 
achates , and the stone was so named 
because it was first found near the 
river Achates, in Sicily. 

There are several other stones 
much like the agate, some of which 
differ from it only in their coloring 
matter. The principal ones are : 

Carnelian, which is found indiffer¬ 
ent shades of red and yellow. The 
most valuable kind is the deep red. 
The best carnelians come from Ja¬ 
pan and from India. The word car¬ 
nelian is from the Latin caro , geni¬ 
tive carnis , flesh, some of the com¬ 
monest ones being flesh color. 

Chalcedony, or calcedony, of a 
milk-white or whitish-yellow ; some¬ 
times found in such large pieces that 
cups and other vessels are made of 
it. It is brought from Iceland, Corn¬ 
wall in England, and Nova Scotia. 
Chalcedony got its name from the 
ancient city of Chalcedon, in Asia 
Minor, where much was found. 

Onyx, usually found in layers of 
white and brown, dark red, or black. 
Many cameos are cut in onyx, the 
raised figure being in the white, and 
the dark layer making the back¬ 
ground ; but sometimes the raised 
figure is cut in the dark layer,.and 
the background made of the white. 

Sardonyx is a beautiful and valu¬ 
able kind of onyx, marked with 
layers of white and a rich orange 
brown. 

Onyx is named from the Greek 
onux, a finger-nail, because the col¬ 
ors are in flat layers, like the marks 
in the human nails. Sardonyx is 
named from Sardis, in Asia Minor, 
or, as some think, from Sardo, the 
Greek name of Sardinia. 

Blood Stone, a green agate marked 
with red spots like blood. It is 
sometimes called oriental jasper. 

AGAVE, the name of a family of 
plants growing chiefly in the hot 
parts of America. The most won¬ 
derful of the agaves is the one called 




AIR 


4 


AIR 


maguey by the Mexicans, and which 
is commonly known in this country 
as the American aloe or century 
plant. It gets its last name because 
it is thought to bloom only when a 
hundred years old ; but this is wrong, 
for though it may sometimes reach 
this age in cool countries, it often 
blooms when less than ten years old 
in hot countries. In the parts 
around New York it blossoms when 
ten to sixty or seventy years of age. 
As soon as the flowers fall the plant 
withers and dies. The Mexicans 
make a drink called pulque from the 
sap of the plant, and from pulque 
they distill (see Alcohol) a strong 
liquor called vino mezcal. A coarse 
kind of thread called pita flax, or 
sisal hemp, is made from the threads 
of its leaves. 

The word agave is in Greek 
agaue , which is from agauos, illus¬ 
trious or noble. 

AIR. We cannot see the air, but 
we know that it is all around us, for 
we take it into our lungs with every 
breath. When it moves we call it 
wind, and we can then see and feel 
what it does ; but air is in the stillest 
places as well as where the wind 
blows the hardest. 

Air is a gas (see Element) with¬ 
out taste or smell, and in small quan¬ 
tities it is without color ; but when 
seen in large quantities, as when we 
look up into the heavens in a clear 
day, it appears bluish. It is not a 
single gas by itself, but a mixture of 
several gases, the chief of which are 
nitrogen and oxygen. In every 
five gallons of air there are nearly 
four gallons of nitrogen and one 
gallon of oxygen ; and, fortunately 
for us, this amount is always the 
same. If the air were all nitrogen, 
we should die for want of oxygen ; 
and if it were all oxygen we should 
live so fast that our lives would soon 
be spent, and everything that can 
burn would quickly burn up. But 
just enough of each are mixed to- j 
gether in the air to make it safe and 
healthful to breathe. 


The air also has in it, besides 
oxygen and nitrogen, a small portion 
of another gas called carbonic 
acid. This gas is a deadly poison, 
if breathed into the lungs by itself, 
but it is safe when mixed, as it is 
in the air, with oxygen and nitrogen. 
It has too an important use. Every 
breath of air taken into the lungs 
becomes changed, that which we 
breathe out having less oxygen and 
more carbonic acid in it than that 
which we breathe in. The nitrogen 
is not changed ; just as much of that 
is breathed out as is breathed in. A 
full grown man breathes out every 
day more than two pounds of car¬ 
bonic acid. As animals, as well as 
human beings, are all the time using 
up oxygen and breathing out carbonic 
acid, there would soon be so little 
oxygen and so much carbonic acid 
in the air as to make it poisonous, if 
there was not some way of getting 
more oxygen and of using up the 
carbonic acid. This is done by the 
leaves of all growing plants, which, 
with the aid of the sunshine, are 
always taking in carbonic acid and 
giving out oxygen. The carbonic 
acid thus taken in gives the CARBON 
for the growth of the plant, and 
the oxygen that comes from the 
leaves mixes with the nitrogen of the 
air and becomes fit to be breathed 
by animals again. Thus the oxygen 
and the carbonic acid in the air are 
always changing, and animals and 
plants are helps to each other. 

The air of cities is less pure than 
that of the country because there are 
more people to breathe it and use up 
its oxygen, and fewer plants and 
trees to take in the carbonic acid gas 
and give back the oxygen. It is also 
made impure by gases from sewers, 
drains, and filth, and by close streets 
and alleys which prevent the blow¬ 
ing in of fresh air. 

Water too has mixed in it a good 
deal of air, or FISHES could not live. 
They also breathe in oxygen and 
breathe out carbonic acid, and the 
carbonic acid is used up and oxygen 




AIR 


5 


AIR 


is given out by sea plants just as is 
done by plants and trees on land. If 
there were no plants in water, the 
carbonic acid would increase so as 
to kill all fishes and other animals 
living in it. 

Besides these three gases air al¬ 
ways has watery vapor in it. This is 
going up from the earth all the time, 
not only from seas, lakes, rivers, 
and damp places, but also from the 
leaves of plants and the lungs and 
skins of animals. Even in the pleas¬ 
antest weather, when the sky looks 
clear and blue, there is watery vapor 
in the air. We cannot see it then 
because it is divided into very small 
particles, but it often changes and 
turns into CLOUDS or FOG, or falls 
as RAIN, and then we see it. 

Air may be weighed like lead, 
stone, or any other substance. If a 
tight vessel full of air be weighed, 
and then weighed again after the air 
has been pumped out (see Air 
Pump), it will weigh less the second 
time than the first. Air may be 
compressed or packed closely into a 
smaller space than it usually fills. 
If you push a tumbler down bottom 
upward into a bowl of water, the 
water will rise up inside of the tum¬ 
bler and press the air into a smaller 
space. It is the same in the diving 
BELL. When it is sunk in very deep 
water the air becomes so dense or 
thick that a man can hardly live in it. 
Divers have sometimes been killed 
in this way. Air is also elastic— 
that is, it will go back into its former 
shape when the pressure is taken off 
from it. This also is shown by 
the diving bell. The air closely 
packed in it swells as the bell is 
drawn up, and forces the water out, 
until at last, when the bell leaves the 
water, it becomes of the same thick¬ 
ness as the surrounding air. The 
common air which we breathe will 
also swell when the pressure is taken 
off from it. If a bladder filled with 
air be placed in a tight jar and 
the air around it in the jar be then 
pumped out, the air in the bladder 


will swell and burst it. Air is also 
impenetrable, by which we mean that 
it will keep out all other matter from 
the space where it is. A very sim¬ 
ple experiment will prove this. Fit 
a funnel tightly into the neck of an 
empty bottle, so that no air can get 
in at the side. You may then fill 
the funnel full of water and it will 
not run into the bottle, because the 
air within is impenetrable. 

When we say that the air has 
weight we mean that it is attracted 
or drawn by the earth just as all 
other things are. Being also com¬ 
pressible, the lower part of it, which 
rests on the earth, is pressed down 
by the great weight of the air above 
it, so that it is much thicker than the 
upper air. This pressure is so great 
that one half of the whole atmos¬ 
phere is squeezed into a belt around 
the earth about two and three 
fourths miles high ; while the other 
half, which is free from this pressure, 
is so spread out that it reaches to a 
height of more than forty miles. 
Some believe that very thin air ex¬ 
tends still further, but the entire 
height of the atmosphere is generally 
thought to be about forty-five miles. 
The pressure on the earth at the 
level of the sea is about fifteen 
pounds to each square inch of sur¬ 
face. A man of common size thus 
bears all the time a weight of about 
30,000 pounds of air, which is equal 
to fifteen cart loads of coal. This 
would crush him if the air did not 
press in every direction, not only 
downward, but upward and sideway 
as well; and if the body were not 
filled with air and other fluids of the 
same thickness as the surrounding 
air, which press equally outward. If 
the pressure of the outer air were 
taken off, the fluids within the body 
would swell, and the parts in which 
they are held would burst. Persons 
who go up in balloons often feel 
great pain, because the upper air is 
much thinner than that below, and 
the air and other fluids within them 
being partly freed from the outward 





AIR 


6 


AIR-PUMP 


pressure expand and force them¬ 
selves through the pores of the 
body, especially out through the thin 
skin inside the nose and mouth. 
The pressure of the air is well shown 
by the leather toy called a ‘ ‘ sucker. 
When this is wet and placed upon a 
smooth surface so as to keep out the 
air between, the weight of the at¬ 
mosphere pressing on the upper side 
causes the leather disk to stick so 
firmly that a brick or stone may 
easily be raised by it. It may also 
be shown in another way with a 
glass tube, one end of which is un¬ 
der water. If the air be sucked out 
of the tube the water will rise in it 
to a height equal to the pressure of 
the air on the surface of the water 
outside the tube (see Barometer). 
The common suction pump works 
in this way. 

Air is also swelled by heat and 
shrunken by cold. If a bladder 
filled with air be heated, the air will 
swell and burst the bladder. The 
atmosphere gets but little heat 
directly from the sun ; generally the 
sun heats the earth, and the earth 
heats the air. As it grows warm it 
becomes thinner and rises, giving 
place to colder air which in turn 
becomes heated and rises until the 
entire atmosphere is heated. Air is 
also condensed and made heavier 
by cold. If a bladder filled with 
air be put in the cold the air in it will 
shrink and the bladder will become 
flabby. The continual heating and 
cooling of the air by heat and cold 
cause the waves of air which we 
call WIND. 

The word air comes from the 
Greek aer, which means the same 
thing. 

AIR-PUMP, a pump for drawing 
the air out of a close vessel. In the 
picture, A is a glass vessel called a 
bell glass, which is open at the bot¬ 
tom, but is made to fit tightly on to 
the brass plate B. The cylinder or 
barrel, C, has a piston, D, which 
moves up and down in it, but fits so 
closely that no air can get by it. 


The bottom of the cylinder is joined 
with the bell glass by the tube E, 
which goes through the plate B. At 
the bottom of the cylinder is a little 
valve or kind of trap door, which 
opens only upward, and in the pis¬ 
ton is another opening the same 
way. Now, suppose that the piston 
is at the bottom of the cylinder and 
the two valves are closed. If the 
piston be pulled up, an empty space 
will be left in the cylinder into which 
the air from all sides will try to rush. 
The air above the piston cannot get 
in, because the valve does not open 
downward ; but the air from the bell 
glass will push open the lower valve 
and fill the space. If the piston be 
now pushed down, the air under the 
piston will press down and close the 
lower valve, but will at the same time 



open the upper valve and go out into 
the outer air. But this air which 
was in the cylinder under the piston 
was a part of that in the bell glass ; 
and every time that we thus work 
the piston we draw out a little more 
of the air from it, so that in time we 
get it nearly all out. Some air- 
pumps work in a different way, but 
the principle is the same in all. 

The space thus made is called 
a vacuum (Latin vacuu?n y empty 
space). We cannot make a perfect 
vacuum with an air-pump, for a little 
air will always stay in the bell glass. 
Many curious things may be shown 
with an air-pump : in a vacuum 
made by it a candle will go out, be¬ 
cause there is no oxygen to feed its 
flame ; smoke will fall down like 
lead, because there is no air to keep 





















ALABASTER 


7 


ALCOHOL 


it up, and an animal -will quickly die 
for want of oxygen. The air-pump 
is used in the low-pressure steam 
ENGINE, and also in many manufac¬ 
tures, such as condensing MILK, 
refining sugar, etc. 

ALABASTER, a fine-grained, 
whitish limestone. There are two 
kinds, gypsum alabaster, which is 
the more delicate and soft, and cal¬ 
careous alabaster, which is firmer in 
grain. The latter, which is used 
for sculpturing large objects, such 
as chimney-pieces and columns, is 
sometimes called oriental alabaster. 
The name alabaster is now generally 
given only to the gypsum kind, which 
is carved into vases, statuettes,boxes, 
and other small ornaments. 

The word alabaster comes from 
the Greek alabastron , and the stone 
was so named from Alabastron, a 
town in ancient Egypt, where it was 
largely manufactured. 

ALBATROSS. See GULL. 

ALBINO, a person or animal 
whose skin and hair are whiter than 
is usual, from the want of coloring 
matter in them. It is supposed to 
be caused by a disease. The name 
was first given by the Portuguese to 
the white negroes on the coast of 
Africa, but it is now applied to per¬ 
sons of any race who are whiter than 
they ought to be. Albinos are more 
common among dark-skinned than 
among yellow and white races. The 
skin and hair of the human albino 
are of a dull milky white, and some 
parts of the eye are deep red. The 
eyes are weak in the daytime, but al¬ 
binos can see better at night than 
other persons. There are albinos 
among animals, birds, and insects ; 
the white ELEPHANT, white mouse, 
white crow, and white blackbird 
are examples. 

The word albino comes from the 
Latin albus, white. 

ALBUMEN. A boiled egg is made 
up of two kinds of meat, the yolk, 
which is yellow, and a pure white 
substance which lies around it. 
The white is albumen, hardened and 


made white by heat. When raw it 
is thin and almost colorless, like 
gum. The yolk of the egg is also 
albumen, but mixed with a yellow 
oil which colors it. Albumen is 
found in the blood and the flesh of 
all living beings. The more there 
is in meat the more tender it is. The 
flesh of young animals is more ten¬ 
der than that of old animals because 
it contains more albumen ; and it 
becomes spoiled quicker for the 
same reason. Salted meat is not 
so good for food as fresh meat be¬ 
cause the albumen is taken out of it 
by the brine. Meat boiled too long 
becomes tough because the albumen 
is hardened like the white of a hard- 
boiled egg. Albumen, abounds also 
in the juices, grains, and other parts 
of plants. It is the most important 
part of food, because it contains in 
a small space more that is good and 
easily digested than any other kind 
of food. For this reason eggs, 
which have so much of it in them, 
are the strongest of all foods. Al¬ 
bumen is the principal one of a class 
of substances called the albuminoid 
or nitrogenous substances, which, 
like the starchy and fatty substances, 
is made up of carbon, hydrogen, 
and OXYGEN, but unlike them has 
also NITROGEN in it. (See Food.) 

The word albumen is Latin, and 
is made from albus , white ; the sub¬ 
stance is so called because the white 
of egg is almost pure albumen. 

ALCOHOL, the spirit in wine, 
beer, cider, etc. When the juice of 
apples is first pressed out, it is 
sweet and has none of the sharp 
taste of cider ; and it does not be¬ 
come cider until it has fermented or 
worked, which takes place after it 
has stood a while. Apple juice is 
only sugar and water flavored with 
the taste of the apple, but after it 
has worked its sweet taste is gone 
and it has spirit or alcohol in it. 
This comes from a change caused by 
the working. Neither the water nor 
that which makes the flavor is 
changed, but only the sugar, which 







ALCOHOL 


ALCOHOL 


has become alcohol. It is the same 
in making wine. Grape juice is only- 
sugar and water flavored with the 
taste of the grape ; but by fermen¬ 
tation the sugar is turned into alco¬ 
hol, and the grape juice becomes 
wine. Now sugar and alcohol are 
made up of just the same things, 
CARBON, OXYGEN, and HYDROGEN, 
only the parts are different. When 
the apple or grape juice ferments, 
bubbles of carbonic acid are 
given off. Thus some of the carbon 
and some of the oxygen of the sugar 
escape into the air ; the hydrogen 
remains just the same, and with the 


carbon and oxygen which are left 
forms alcohol. Therefore, sugar, by 
fermentation, is divided into two 
things, carbonic acid gas, which 
goes off into the air, and alcohol, 
which stays behind in the liquid. 

All spirituous liquors have alco¬ 
hol in them, and it is this which 
makes people drunk when they 
drink too much. Brandy, whisky, 
rum, and gin, which are called dis¬ 
tilled liquors, are about one half al¬ 
cohol, sherry and port wines about 
one fourth or one fifth, and claret 
and white wines one tenth. Ale 
and cider have still less in them. 



Distilled liquors are so called be¬ 
cause they are made by distillation 
(from Latin destillare, to trickle or 
drop down). The substance to be 
distilled is first heated until it turns 
to vapor or steam ; this vapor then 
passes into another vessel which is 
kept cold, and the coolness conden¬ 
ses it (from Latin condensare , to 
make thick), that is, turns it back 
into a liquid. Now alcohol will boil 
and turn into vapor at a much lower 
heat than water ; therefore the alco¬ 
hol vapor whll all pass over into the 
condenser, or second vessel, and 
be condensed into a liquid again 


before the water begins to boil 
much. 

The process is shown in the pic¬ 
ture, where a is a large copper ves¬ 
sel called a still, in which the sub¬ 
stance to be distilled is heated over 
a furnace fire. The vapor of the al¬ 
cohol rises, passes through the pipe 
b down into the condenser, which is 
made up of a coiled tube c (called 
from its looks the worm) in a vessel 
d, called the worm-tub. The worm- 
tub is kept full of cold water by 
means of the pipe c. The water 
enters the tub near the bottom and 
runs off through the pipe / at the 











































































ALDER 


9 


ALLIGATOR 


top, so that it is always cool ; and 
the vapor of the alcohol passing 
through the worm is cooled and con¬ 
densed and trickles out of the end of 
the pipe at g. Some watery vapor, 
or steam, will always pass over and 
be condensed with the alcohol, so 
that distilled liquors are usually 
about half alcohol and half water ; 
but by distilling several times the al¬ 
cohol may be got nearly pure. 

Alcohol is much used in medicine 
and in the arts. Medicines are made 
by mixing drugs with it, cologne and 
other perfumed spirits by flavoring 
it with different kinds of oils, and 
varnishes by putting into it resins 
and gums. When mixed with spir¬ 
its of turpentine it makes camphene 
and burning fluid. Alcohol will not 
freeze, and therefore it is used in 
very cold countries in THERMOME¬ 
TERS instead of mercury. It has a 
great liking for water, and mixes 
with it readily. Meat put into it will 
keep for a long time, for the alcohol 
takes the water out of it, and thus 
keeps it from decaying. For this 
reason it is much used by doctors 
and others to preserve specimens in. 
Alcohol is burned in lamps when a 
very hot flame without smoke is 
wanted, and in Germany it is much 
used in little cooking stoves. 

Alcohol gets its name from the 
Arabic al kohol , the powder of anti¬ 
mony, with which people in Asia 
stain their eyelids. This powder is 
very fine and pure, and the name 
was in time given in Europe to alco¬ 
hol, because it is a pure extract; but 
the Arabs never used the word in 
that way. 

ALDER, a common tree, which 
grows usually in wet land. The 
principal kinds of it belong to North 
America. Alder wood is valuable 
for turning and for some kinds of 
cabinet work, and it is also used for 
mill-wheels and other wood-work 
under water. Its charcoal is 
considered the best for making 
gunpowder, and its bark is used in 
tanning leather and in dyeing cloth. 


The word alder is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon aler. 

ALE^ See Beer. 

ALKALI, the common name of a 
class of bases which differ in some 
things from other bases. They have 
a peculiar sharp and biting taste. 
In the article Acid is told that if a 
piece of blue litmus paper be put 
into an acid, the paper will turn red. 
If now the same piece of paper, 
reddened by the acid, be put into an 
alkali, it will turn blue again. Thus 
the action of the acid is neutralized 
or killed by that of the alkali. If 
an alkali be mixed with an acid, the 
two will unite, like any other base 
with an acid, and form a SALT. 
Alkalies unite with oils and fats to 
form SOAP. The principal alkalies 
are SODA, POTASH, and AMMONIA. 

Some other substances also, such 
as lime and magnesia, have the 
power of neutralizing acids, and are 
therefore called alkaline earths ; but 
in other things they are not alto¬ 
gether like alkalies. 

The word alkali is from the Ara¬ 
bic al kali , the ashes of a plant from 
which soda was once made. 

ALLIGATOR, a large reptile, found 
only in North and South America. It 
lives both on the land and in the 
water. It looks like the crocodile, but 
differs from it. The crocodile lives 
either in salt or in fresh water, but 
the alligator never goes into the salt 
water. The common alligator found 
in the Southern States grows 14 to 
15 feet long ; its head is about one 
seventh of its entire length, and its 
mouth is very large, with a single 
row of pointed teeth in each jaw. 
Fish is its principal food, but it 
catches and devours land animals 
and sometimes even men. It likes a 
negro better than a white man, and 
a dog or a hog better than either. 
It lays 50 to 60 eggs, about the size 
of goose eggs, covers them with 
sand, and leaves them to be hatched 
by the sun. The young, which are 
five or six inches long when they 
leave the shell, take to the water as 




ALLOY 


io 


ALMOND 


soon as hatched. They love to play 
in the sunshine, and whenjfright- 
ened will scamper away yelping like 
puppies. When there is any dan¬ 
ger the mother alligator will some¬ 
times swallow her young, who run 
one by one down her throat. The 
hide of the full-grown alligator is 
covered with bony scales, which are 
very hard, but it is not true that a 
rifle-ball will not go through them, as 
is generally said. A rifle-ball will 
go into an alligator almost any¬ 
where, if it strikes fairly. Alligator 
skin, when tanned, makes good lea¬ 
ther for boots and shoes. 

The alligator is a reptile of the 
crocodile order. 

The word alligator is from the 
Spanish el lagarto, the lizard, a name 
given to this reptile by the Span¬ 
iards because they thought it looked 
like a lizard. 

ALLOY. Gold and silver when 
pure are very soft and easily worn 
out by use. They are not fit there¬ 
fore to make coins of until they are 
mixed with some other metal to 
harden them. This is called alloy¬ 
ing them, and the mixed metal it¬ 
self is called an alloy. Alloys are 
made with different kinds of metal ; 
for instance, bronze, brass, pew¬ 
ter, and TYPE metal, are all alloys. 
The silver coins of the United States 
are made up of nine parts of silver 
and one of copper; in the gold 
coins nine parts are gold and the 
other part is one quarter silver and 
three quarters copper. A mixture 
of mercury or quicksilver with an¬ 
other metal is called an amal¬ 
gam. 

The word alloy is from the French 
aloi, standard, which is from a la 
lot , according to law, meaning the 
standard of coin fixed by law. 

ALLSPICE, the berry of the pi¬ 
mento tree, so called because it is 
supposed to unite the flavor of 
cloves, nutmegs, and cinnamon. 
The pimento grows in South Amer¬ 
ica and the West India Islands, par¬ 
ticularly in Jamaica, It is an ever¬ 


green, and is sometimes four or five 
times as high as a man. The berries 
are picked when full grown, but be¬ 
fore they begin to ripen, and are 
carefully dried. Allspice is some¬ 
times called Jamaica pepper. 

ALMANAC, a book telling the 
division of the year into months, 
weeks, and days, the time of the ris¬ 
ing of the sun, the moon, and the 
tides, and other useful things. The 
Arabs are supposed to have first 
made them. The first printed al¬ 
manac was a German one, pub¬ 
lished in Vienna in 1457. Most of 
the early almanacs pretended to 
foretell the weather and other 
events, and some almanacs still do 
so ; but they are believed only by 
ignorant persons. Almanacs giving 
information about official matters 
and other facts are now published 
in almost all countries. One of the 
most celebrated of these, the Al¬ 
manack de Gotha (Almanac of Go¬ 
tha), published at Gotha, in Ger¬ 
many, in both French and German, 
is now (1879) in its 116th year. 
More than 100 almanacs of all kinds 
are published yearly in the United 
States. 

It is not certainly known what 
this word is made from. Some 
think it is an Arabic word, and 
others that it comes from the Anglo- 
Saxon allmonaght , a sketch or draw¬ 
ing of the course of the moon. 

ALMOND, the fruit of the almond 
tree, which grows in the countries 
around the Mediterranean. Its fruit 
or nut is covered with a hard green 
shell which dries as it ripens, and 
finally bursts open, and lets the al¬ 
mond drop out. There are two 
principal kinds of almonds, the sweet 
and the bitter. Sweet almonds are 
largely used in confectionery and for 
dessert, but they are not worth 
much for food, and are very hard to 
digest. Almond oil, made by press¬ 
ing almonds, is used as a flavor in 
medicines, and for scenting toilet 
soap. The bitter almond is small¬ 
er than the sweet, and has in it 




ALOES 


ii 


ALPHABET 


less oil ; and the oil is very poi¬ 
sonous, owing to prussic acid in it. 
Almonds are brought from France, 
Spain, Italy, Malta, and the East. 
The finest kind, called Jordan al¬ 
monds, are brought from Mal¬ 
aga. 

The almond tree belongs to the 
same family with the peach, plum, 
CHERRY, and NECTARINE. The 
word almond has been changed 
from its Latin name amygdala. 

ALOES, the dried juice of the 
leaves of the aloe tree. There are 
several kinds of the tree, which is 
found in India, Arabia, and some 
other parts of Asia, Madagascar, 
the Cape of Good Hope, and the 
West Indies. The best aloes comes 
from the island of Socotra, in the 
Indian Ocean near the mouth of the 
Red Sea. Aloes is used as a medi¬ 
cine. 

The word aloe is from the Latin 
and Greek aloe. 

ALPACA, an animal living in the 
mountains of Peru and of Chili. It 
is shaped much like a sheep, but is 
larger, and its color varies from gray¬ 
ish white to brown and almost black. 
Its wool is nearly a foot long, and is 
soft and silky and very strong for its 
fineness. A great deal is sent every 
year to England, where it is made 
into shawls and several kinds of 
cloth. The thin cloth called alpaca 
is woven out of alpaca wool, mixed 
with silk or cotton. The alpaca 
is a timid and gentle animal, and 
lets itself be led about by those 
who tend it, but it is ugly to 
strangers. 

The alpaca is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia , or cud-chewing 
animals, and of the same family with 
the camel. The name is Spanish, 
and is made from paco , the Peru¬ 
vian name of the animal. 

ALPHABET. This word is made 
out of the Greek names of the first 
two letters of the alphabet, alpha 
and beta (A and B) ; so when we 
say alphabet, we merely say A B. 
All alphabets are not alike. In the 


English alphabet and many others 
there are letters for the sounds of 
both the vowels and the conso¬ 
nants ; but in the Hebrew alphabet 
there are letters for the consonants 
only, the vowels being marked by 
slight changes in some of the con¬ 
sonant letters. Some alphabets, 
like that of the Cherokee Indians, 
have a letter for each syllable. In the 
writing of the Chinese, who have no 
proper alphabet, there is a charac¬ 
ter or sign for every word in the lan¬ 
guage. 

The alphabets of most of the Eu¬ 
ropean languages are much like each 
other. This is because they came 
from the same source, nearly all of 
them having grown out of the alpha¬ 
bet used by the Romans. The Ro¬ 
mans got theirs from the Greeks, 
and the Greek alphabet was made 
out of the Phoenician, which is told 
about in the article Writing. In 
most of the European alphabets the 
letters are placed nearly as they are 
in English, but as some of the lan¬ 
guages do not have all of the Eng¬ 
lish sounds, they want a few of our 
letters. Thus, the Italians have no 
K, W, X, and Y, the Spanish and 
Portuguese no K and W, and the 
French no W. The Russian lan¬ 
guage has many sounds not found 
in the other languages, and has 
thirty-six letters, many of which 
are shaped differently from those of 
other alphabets. 

In English printing many alpha¬ 
bets of variously formed letters are 
used, but they all have the same 
meaning. The letters most used in 
books and newspapers are called 
Roman letters, because they are like 
those used by the Romans. But the 
Romans had no small letters like 
ours ; all their letters were capitals. 
The slanting letters, which we call 
Italics, came into use about the year 
1500. They were named Italics by 
Aldus Manutius, an Italian printer, 
who first made them. Script letters 
are also slanting, but they are made 
like letters written with a pen. Some 





ALUM 


12 


AMALGAM 


of the other alphabets used in print¬ 
ing are : 

©IU lEnflltsi), or 33 lacft 3 Letter. 

dtrntan Gothic. 

Full Face. Antique. 

The different sizes of common Ro¬ 
man type are shown in the article 
Type. 

ALUM, a whitish, salty substance, 
largely used in the arts. Alum is 
sometimes found pure in the earth, 
but most of it is made from alum 
rocks and alum earth. The mate¬ 
rial is first roasted with fire in heaps 
and then mixed with hot water in 
great pans ; the liquid is afterward 
drawn off and boiled down until 
most of the water passes off in steam, 
and only the solid part is left. 

Alum is used largely in medicine. 
It is also employed by bakers to 
whiten bread made from poor flour, 
by sugar-makers for whitening sugar, 
by dyers to fix colors, and by tanners 
in preparing skins and in coloring 
morocco. 

Alum is a salt made up of alu¬ 
mina (see Aluminum), potash, 
SULPHURIC ACID, and water. 

The word alum is a short form of 
the Latin alumen. 

ALUMINUM, a metal and one of 
the ELEMENTS. When pure it is 
bluish - white, bright, about one 
fourth as heavy as silver, takes a fine 
polish, and does not oxidize or rust 
in the air at common heat. It may 
be hammered out into thin sheets 
like gold and silver, and may be 
drawn into fine wire. Aluminum is 
the most abundant of the metals, and 
with the exception of OXYGEN and 
SILICON it is the most abundant thing 
in the world, being found in clay, 
marl, slate, feldspar, mica, and many 
other minerals. But no cheap way 
has yet been found out to get this 
metal, which might be of great use 
in the arts. As now made it is about 
as costly as silver, but on account of 
its lightness it is very valuable for 
many purposes. An ALLOY of two 
parts aluminum-and one part silver 


is much used instead of silver for mak¬ 
ing candlesticks, harness ornaments, 
drinking cups, spoons and forks, tel¬ 
escopes and opera glasses, mathe¬ 
matical instruments, etc. Aluminum 
forms alloys also with iron, zinc, 
nickel, and copper. Aluminum 
bronze, made of nine parts of copper 
and one part of aluminum, is very 
hard, may be easily hammered, is 
almost as strong as steel, and of a 
beautiful golden color. Watch 
cases and common jewelry are made 
of it. 

Alumina (aluminum oxide) is 
formed by the union of oxygen with 
aluminum. When pure it is a 
light, white powder, without taste 
or smell, and will not melt in any 
common fire. It is the most com¬ 
mon of all earths, and is the chief 
thing in CLAY. Emery is nearly 
pure alumina, and the ruby and sap¬ 
phire are made up of alumina col¬ 
ored with oxides or rusts of dif¬ 
ferent metals. Topaz, lapis lazuli, 
turquoise, and corundum are also 
mostly alumina. 

AMALGAM, an ALLOY of metals, 
one of which is MERCURY. Mercury, 
which is also called quicksilver, has 
the power to dissolve most other met¬ 
als and mix with them. This causes it 
to be much used in separating gold 
and silver from their ores. In gold 
mining, the quartz rock in which the 
gold is mixed in little grains is 
crushed into small pieces and then 
washed through several machines in 
which mercury is put. The mercury 
takes up all the little pieces of gold 
and mixes with them, while the earthy 
matter is washed away. The mer¬ 
cury is then driven off by heat, as is 
explained in the article Mercury, 
and the gold is left. The same pro¬ 
cess, which is called amalgamation, 
is used in mining silver. Amal¬ 
gams are largely made use of in the 
arts. Metals are sometimes gilded 
by washing them with an amalgam 
of gold and mercury ; the mercury 
is then driven off by heat, leaving 
the gold on the metal. For the way 







AMBER 


13 


AMBERGRIS 


of silvering looking glasses with an 
amalgam of tin and mercury, see 
Mirror. 

The word amalgam is made up of 
the Greek words ama , together, and 
gainein , to marry, meaning that in 
it metals are joined together. 

AMBER, a hard, light, yellow 
substance, often clouded with white, 
supposed to be the hardened gum 
of a kind of pine tree which does 
not grow now. It is found in small 
quantities in many parts of the 
world, as on the coasts of the Adri¬ 
atic Sea and of Sicily, in Siberia and 
Greenland, and in the United States 
in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and 
Maryland ; but most of the amber 
sold comes from the Prussian coasts 
of the Baltic Sea. Some is dug out 
of the ground, and some is picked 
up on the shores where it is washed 
up during storms, but the greater 
part is got out of the sea itself. It 
is supposed that in ancient times the 
climate of North Germany was much 
warmer than it is now, and that the 
coast of the Baltic was covered with 
a great pine forest. Pieces of the 
bark and cones of these trees are 
often found sticking to the amber, 
and many insects belonging to a 
warm climate, of kinds which do 
not live now, are also found in it. 
Such pieces are valued more than 
plain pieces. Much of the amber 
taken from the sea is found stick¬ 
ing to seaweed. After an easterly 
storm, even in the coldest weather, 
the peasant men stand in the water 
and throw the seaweed with forks 
upon the sand, where the women 
and children pick off the pieces of 
amber. Out in the sea a good many 
dredging machines (see Dredge) 
are all the time at work tearing up 
the seaw'eed from the bottom and dig¬ 
ging up the mud, both of which are 
brought up and carefully searched 
for amber. Lately, men clothed in 
diving armor, much like that shown 
in the picture in the article Diving 
Bell, have been employed in getting 
it, with great success. 


Amber is usually found only in 
small pieces, from the size of a 
grain of wheat up to that of a hen’s 
egg. The largest piece ever found, 
now in the museum in Berlin, is 
about as large as a child’s head. 
Amber is much used for making 
ornaments, such as beads, neck¬ 
laces, earrings, pendants, etc., for 
the mouthpieces of pipes and cigar- 
holders, and for burning for per¬ 
fume. A good deal is sent to 
Mecca, where it is burned as in¬ 
cense by Mohammedans in their 
worship. 

If a piece of amber be rubbed 
until it gets warm and then put near 
some small pieces of paper or cot¬ 
ton, they will fly toward it, cling to 
it for a moment, and then fly off 
again. This is caused by the elec¬ 
tricity in the amber, which is 
stirred up by the rubbing. There 
is so much electricity in it that the 
workmen who make things out of 
amber have to change the pieces 
often to keep it from hurting them. 
The Greeks, who knew that amber 
would act in this way, named it elec- 
tro 7 i , and out of this word was made 
our word electricity. 

The word amber is from the 
Arabic word anbar , the name of a 
fish from which it was once thought 
that ambergris came ; ambergris 
was first called anbar, but the name 
was finally given to yellow amber. 

AMBERGRIS, a gray fatty sub¬ 
stance, used as a perfume, some¬ 
times found floating in the sea, and 
sometimes in the intestines of the 
sperm whale. It is formed by the 
indigestion of part of the whale’s 
food, and pieces of mussels or of 
fish are often found inside of it. 
Usually only a few ounces are got 
from a whale, but as much as a hun¬ 
dred pounds have been found. Am¬ 
bergris sometimes floats ashore, and 
is picked up on the beach, especially 
in India, Madagascar, Japan, and. 
Brazil. Foxes have a great liking 
for it, and often search for it along 
the seashore, swallowing every bit, 





AMETHYST 


14 


ANCHOR 


they can find. It passes through 
them unchanged excepting in color, 
its gray tint having become a clear 
white. This is the white ambergris, 
which is the most prized of all. It 
is sometimes found in South-western 
France, far away from the sea, and 
it is there called by the peasants 
ainbre renarde (foxed amber). 

Ambergris sells for about $5 an 
ounce. When mixed with alcohol it 
makes a very delicate perfume, and 
it has the power of making other 
perfumes smell stronger. 

The word ambergris is from the 
French ambregris , gray amber, 
which is made up of the Arabian 
anbar , AMBER, and the French gris, 
gray. 

AMETHYST, a kind of rock crystal 
or QUARTZ of a violet or purple col¬ 
or, much used for making seals, 
rings, and other ornaments. The 
ancients made vases and cups out of 
it. The finest amethyst comes from 
India, Ceylon, and Brazil. The ori¬ 
ental amethyst, a very valuable pre¬ 
cious stone, of a fine violet color, is 
a SAPPHIRE. 

The word amethyst is from the 
Greek amethustos, preventing drunk¬ 
enness, because the ancients believed 
that liquor drunk out of cups made 
of amethyst would not intoxicate. 

AMMONIA, an alkali much 
used in the arts. In its pure state, 
and at the common heat and pres¬ 
sure, it is a strong colorless gas (see 
Element), but it may easily be 
made into a liquid or a solid. Liquid 
ammonia is usually made by mixing 
the gas with water. It is commonly 
called “spirits of hartshorn,” be¬ 
cause it was formerly made by dis¬ 
tillation (see Alcohol) from the 
horns of the hart or stag. It is now 
made mostly from the waste tar 
water of gas works. The salt of 
hartshorn, usually called “ smelling 
salts,” is carbonate of ammonia, a 
salt formed by the union of car¬ 
bonic acid with the base am¬ 
monia. 

Ammonia is supposed to have 


got its name from the temple of Am¬ 
mon, in Upper Egypt, near which 
it was made in ancient times. 

AMPHIBIANS. These animals are 
sometimes made an order in the class 
of reptiles, but as they are really 
half way between reptiles and fishes 
they ought to be kept separate from 
both. Amphibians are cold-blooded 
animals, of small size, which live 
both on land and in the water. 
Their skin is generally naked and 
smooth, without any scale or shell 
covering as in the reptiles. They 
all begin life as little fish-like crea¬ 
tures, with large flat heads and out¬ 
side gills for breathing air in water, 
just as fishes do. At this time they 
are called tadpoles. As they grow 
up, little air sacs within them be¬ 
come large and act like lungs, en¬ 
abling them to breathe common air. 
Some of this class, such as the 
sirens, do not lose their gills after 
they grow up, but have both gills 
and lungs at the same time. Am¬ 
phibians differ from fishes in several 
things, but especially in having four 
limbs which are not at all like fins. 

There are several orders of am¬ 
phibians, but the only common ones 
which we need to notice are the 
frogs (including tree-frogs) and the 
TOADS. 

The word amphibians is in Latin 
amphibia , and means leading a 
double life, that is, in the water and 
on land. It is made up of two Greek 
words, am ft hi, or both sides, and 
bios, life. 

ANCHOR, an iron hook for hold¬ 
ing a ship by chaining her to the 
bottom of a harbor or road, which is 
hence called an “anchorage.” In 
ancient times large stones, bags of 
sand, or pieces of wood weighted 
with lead were used for anchors. 
The Chinese still make use of crooked 
wooden anchors. Iron anchors were 
first used by the Greeks. Anchors 
are now made of the best wrought 
iron. The parts of the common an¬ 
chor will be seen in the picture : A is 
the shank, B the stock, C C the arms, 




ANCHOVY 


15 


ANIMAL 


D one of the flukes, and E the ring 
or shackle. Once the stock was 
made of wood, but it is now gen¬ 
erally of iron, with one end bent 
down, as shown in the picture. By 



Common Anchor. 


pulling out the pin a the stock may 
be pushed through the shank and 
laid down upon it, so as to make 
the anchor easier to carry. 

The word anchor comes from the 
Latin atichora , Greek angkura. 

ANCHOVY, a small fish caught in 
the Mediterranean Sea in May, June, 
and July. The fishermen go out in 
the night, carrying torches in their 
boats. The fish see the light and 
swim up to the boats in great num¬ 
bers, when they are scooped up 
with nets. After being cleaned they 
are packed in brine in small barrels 
and sent to other countries, where 
they are usually taken out and put 



Anchovy. 


into bottles. The anchovy looks 
like the herring, but it is not more 
than three inches long. It is eaten 
raw, as a relish, or made into sauce. 
Anchovy sauce has been used since 
the time of the ancient Romans, who 
called it garum. A kind of anchovy 


is plentiful along the coasts of the 
United States. 

The word anchovy comes from the 
Spanish anchcroa , from an old word 
meaning a dried or pickled fish. 

ANIMAL. Animals differ gener¬ 
ally from plants in being able to 
move from place to place, though 
there are some animals which have 
not this power. Every kind of ani¬ 
mal has some place on the earth 
where it lives best, so that the earth’s 
surface may be divided up into parts, 
each of which has its own animals. 
All of those which belong to any one 
country are called the fauna of that 
country. The fauna of warm and 
moist climates is much more plenti¬ 
ful than that of cold and dry climates, 
and that of the sea is more plentiful 
than that of the land. Most animals 
live in the light, but some live in 
places where there is no light, as in 
caves. Such ones do not have fully- 
formed eyes, as they have no use for 
them. 

All animals are classed together 
in one great body called the Animal 
Kingdom (see Element). This is 
divided into four sub-kingdoms : I. 
Vertebrates; II. Articulates; III. 
Mollusks; IV. Radiates, the last three 
of which are usually called the inverte¬ 
brates. Each of these sub-kingdoms 
is again divided into several classes ; 
classes are divided into orders ; and 
orders are divided into families. 
For example, the wolf belongs to the 
dog family ; the dog family belongs 
to the order carnivora , or flesh- 
eaters the order carnivora belongs 
to the class mammalia, or MAM¬ 
MALS ; and the class mammalia 
belongs to the sub-kingdom of the 
vertebrates. 

I. Vertebrates have an inside skele¬ 
ton, the back-bone in which is called 
the vertebral or spinal column. 
This is found in man, in quadru¬ 
peds or four-footed animals, in birds, 
in reptiles, in amphibians, and in 
fishes. The skeletons of all of these 
differ in many things, but they are 
alike in having a back-bone or verte- 


















ANIMAL 


16 


ANIMAL 


bral column. This is made up of 
many bones fitting together, each 
one of which is called a vertebra 
(Latin vertebra , plural vertebree , a 
joint, from vertere , to turn, because 
each one turns on the other). The 
number and shape of the vertebrae 
differ greatly. In the back-bone of 
man there are but 24 vertebrae, while 
in that of some snakes there are more 
than 400. A human vertebra is 
b 



Vertebra of Man. 


shown in Fig. 1 : a is the front part, 
and b the sharp rear part which you 
feel when you rub your hand up and 
down your back. All vertebrate an¬ 
imals are alike also in having red 
BLOOD, moved by a heart, and a 
brain with a spinal marrow or spinal 
cord, as it is sometimes called. The 
round hole, c, in the vertebra fits on 
to a like one in the next vertebra, so 
that when all are joined together a 
passage or tube is formed through 
the whole spinal column. In this lies 
the spinal marrow, from which all the 
nerves branch to the different parts 
of the body. 

The vertebrates are divided into 
five classes: 1. Mammals ; 2. 

Birds ; 3. Reptiles ; 4. Amphibi¬ 
ans ; 5. Fishes. Of these, mammals 
and birds are called warm-blooded 
animals, because their blood keeps 
warm even when the air is very cool, 
and reptiles, amphibians, and fishes 
cold-blooded animals, because their 
blood differs with the warmth and 
coolness of the air or water in which 
they live. The blood of a fish or a 


frog is just as cool as the water in 
which it swims, and this is why those 
animals feel cold to our hands. 

II. Articulates include all animals 
whose bodies are made up of rings 
jointed together. These rings are 
easily seen in the picture of a worm, 



Worm, showing Rings. 

Fig. 2, whose body is wholly made 
up of them. When a lobster shell is 
dry it will break up into many perfect 
rings. Articulates have no inside 
skeleton, like the vertebrates, but 
their outside shell answers the same 
purpose, all the MUSCLES being fast¬ 
ened to it. The articulates differ 
also from the vertebrates in their 
nerves. They have no brain and no 
spinal cord, but a kind of chain of 
nerves, with little knots along it, with 
other nerves leading from them to 
the different parts of the body. They 
have too no heart, and, with a few 
exceptions, their blood is white. 
They are divided into five classes : 
1. Insects ; 2. Arachnids, or 

spiders (including scorpions and 
mites) ; 3. Crustaceans, of which 
the principal order is the decapoda 
(ten-footed, from Greek deka, ten, 
and pons, foot), in which are crabs, 
lobsters, SHRIMPS, etc. ; 4. Miria- 
pods (centipedes, etc.) ; 5. Worms. 
The word articulate is in Latin artic- 
ulata, which is from artus, a joint. 

III. Mollusks are soft-bodied ani¬ 
mals, most of which have shells, but 
some of which are naked. The shell 
is not an outside skeleton, like the 
shells, of the articulates, but only a 
protection for the body. Mollusks 
generally have no limbs. Their 
bodies are flabby, and have a soft 
skin which often hangs over around 
them in thick folds, forming what is 
called the mantle. This is easily 
seen in the oyster and the clam. 
The lime (CALCIUM carbonate) from 




ANIMALCULE 


i7 


ANIMALCULE 


which the SHELL is made is taken 
up from the water in which the ani¬ 
mal lives and spread around by means 
of the mantle in layers on the inside. 
The blood of mollusks is nearly col¬ 
orless, but has sometimes a light 
blue or greenish tinge. Their 
NERVES grow out of little lumps call¬ 
ed nerve knots, which are arranged 
differently in different kinds of mol¬ 
lusks. Most MOLLUSKS cannot 
move, but have to stay always in one 
place and get their food as they can 
when the waves and currents bring 
it to them. 

IV. Radiates are named from the 
radiated or star-like form of their 
bodies. Star fish are good exam¬ 
ples of them. Other radiates are 
CORAL animals, sea anemones (see 
Aquarium), and jelly fish. In 
former times many of this class were 
supposed to be plants, and they are 
very much like vegetables in some 
things. None of them have a head, 
and though some of them move 
about, others always stay in the place 
where they grow, some of them being 
fixed like plants on a common trunk. 
Many radiates have the power of giv¬ 
ing out the light called phosphores¬ 
cence, so often seen in the sea at 
night. When the sea is calm its sur¬ 
face looks as if sprinkled with fine 
stars, and when the water is rough the 
waves roll like billows of fire. Some¬ 
times this light is milky white or 
bluish. 

The word radiates is in Latin 
radiata , which comes from radius , 
a ray. Phosphorescence is made 
from the Greek word phosphor os, 
light - bringer, which comes from 
phoSy light, and phcrein, to bring. 

Sponges are sometimes put into 
this class, and sometimes into a class 
of their own called Protozoans, 
meaning first or earliest animals, 
from the Greek words protos, first, 
and zoon, animal. 

ANIMALCULE, an animal so small 
that it can be seen well only with a 
MICROSCOPE. Some animalcules 
can just be seen with the naked eye, 


but most of them are so small that 
if it were not for the microscope we 
would not even know that there are 
such things in the world. If a single 
drop of water be put under a micro¬ 
scope it will be seen to swarm with 
living things, some of which are no 
thicker than a single hair, and some 
are so small that many thousands of 
them would not take up any more 
room than a grain of sand. Three 
common forms of animalcules are 
shown in the first picture. There 
are thousands of kinds of these little 
animals of many different shapes. 
Some are like long slender lines, 
some coiled up like a watch spring, 
some like triangles, some round like 
a ball, some round and flat, some 


Animalcules. 

like seeds, and some are shaped like 
bells, funnels, thimbles, drums, 
shoes, and many other things. They 
appear to be always moving, day and 
night, and never taking any rest. 
Some of them move straight forward 
like an arrow so quickly that they can 
hardly be seen, while some drag their 
bodies along slowly like a worm ; 
some buzz round like a wheel, some 
crawl like a snake, and some move 
in little leaps. The water of every 
ditch, pond, and river is full of them, 
whether in cold or in hot countries, 
and there are as many in salt as in 
fresh water. They are found too in 
the water of hot springs and in the 
ice of the Arctic regions. 

Not only are all kinds of animal 
and vegetable matter seen under the 








ANIMALCULE 


18 


ANT 


microscope to be full of living ani¬ 
malcules, but the shells of thousands 
of dead kinds are found in many 
forms of mineral matter. Large parts 
of some kinds of rocks, of sand, 
mud, and dust are made up of the 
remains of these little animals which 
lived and died ages ago. A piece 
of chalk as large as a walnut has in 



Shell Animalcule. 

it hundreds of thousands of little 
shells which were once the homes of 
animalcules. The building stone 
used in Paris and many other kinds 
of building stone are full of like 
shells, and the rotten stone called 
Tripoli is full of shells so small that 
thousands of millions of them are 



Shell Animalcule. 


found in a single inch. In some parts 
of the world they form nearly half the 
sand of the sea beach. These little 
shells are of many different sizes and 
forms, but all are very curious and 
beautiful when looked at with a mi¬ 
croscope. Living forms of some of 
these little animals have been found 


in the ocean. Their bodies inside 
the shells are made up of a jelly-like 
substance, from which little arms and 
feet, like threads of glass, stretch out 
through holes in the shell. They 
seize their prey with these arms, and 
it is supposed that there is something 
poisonous in them, for the animals 
caught appear to lose the power of 
moving as soon as touched. Two 
kinds of these shell-covered animal¬ 
cules are shown in the pictures. The 
little threads are also used as feet 
when the animalcule climbs up any¬ 
thing. 

Animalcules are the lowest kinds 
of animals known, none of them 
having NERVES and organs of sense. 

The word animalcule means a 
small animal, and is from the Latin 
animalculum , which comes from 
animal , an animal. 

ANISE SEED, the seed of a plant 
which grows wild in Europe and 
North Africa. It is cultivated in 
Malta, Spain, and Germany. An¬ 
ise seed is used for flavoring candies 
and liqueurs, and is made into a 
cordial. 

The word anise is from the Latin 

anisum. 

ANNOTTO, or ANNATTO, a red¬ 
dish or yellowish dye stuff, made 
from the outside of the seeds of a tree 
which grows in Brazil. It is used to 
color butter and cheese, and also by 
dyers, painters, and soap-makers. 

ANT. There are several hundred 
kinds of ants in different parts of the 
world. They live in societies or 
families, sometimes many thousands 
in number, and are divided into 
three classes, females, males, and 
workers. The females are the larg¬ 
est, the males next in size, and the 
workers the smallest. The females 
and the males have wings, but the 
workers are without wings. 

The male ants have no work to 
do. After they have paired with 
the females, they go off where they 
please and soon after die. The fe¬ 
males lay little eggs, so small that 
they can scarcely be seen by the 








ANT 


19 


ANT 


naked eye, scattering them about in 
the nest wherever they happen to 
be. The workers gather them up 
and take care of them, putting them 
in the sun in the morning and into 
a safe dry place in the nest at 
night, until they are hatched. The 
larvse, or grubs, which come out of 
the eggs, are small, white worms, 
without any legs. They are treated 
in the same way as the eggs by the 
workers, who feed them with a li¬ 
quid brought up out of their own 
stomachs. When the grub gets 
large enough it spins a web all 
around itself, which covers it Hke 
the cocoon of a silkworm. The 
cocoons are carried out into the sun 
and in at night by the workers, just 
as the eggs and the grubs were, 
until the time comes for them to be 
born again, when the workers cut 
the cocoons, and they come out per¬ 
fect ants. 

Besides taking care of the eggs, 
the grubs, and the cocoons, the 
working ants have to get all the 
food of the society, to build the 
houses and streets, and keep them in 
repair. Some of their dwellings are 
very wonderful. Most ants build 
their houses or nests in the ground, 
above which they rise like a cone or 
hill, and hence are called ant-hills. 
These have many little rooms in 
them, in stories one above another, 
and connected by galleries. In 
South America they are sometimes 
seen two or three times as high as 
a man. A kind called mining ants 
dig long galleries in clay, building 
pillars to support the roof, and 
thatching them with grass and 
heather. Carpenter ants make their 
houses in growing trees, boring out 
their cells deep into the wood, with 
partitions between them no thicker 
than a card. A kind of ant in Aus¬ 
tralia builds houses of leaves, which 
are brought to the place wanted by 
the strength of a great many work¬ 
ing together, and then fastened with 
a kind of glue. 

Ants are very active and very 


strong for their size. A man could 
not drag the body of a heavy horse 
over rocks and rough places for sev¬ 
eral miles, yet the little ant which 
carries off a grasshopper or a beetle 
does more than this. An ant will 
lift and carry things ten or twelve 
times its own weight, and will do it 
without appearing to be much tired. 
Ants too are among the most indus¬ 
trious of all animals. They will 
work all day long, and in warm 
weather, if need be, at night also, 
building houses, taking care of their 
young, and laying up food. They 
eat different kinds of food, some 
liking best vegetable food and some 
animal. Some kinds of ants keep 
other insects for the food which they 
give, just as we keep cows for milk. 
Their cows are plant-lice, found on 
the leaves of plants. These little 
insects have a sweet honey-like 
liquid within them which ants love 
very much. The brown garden ant 
may often be seen climbing up the 
stalks of shrubs and bushes, looking 
for them. When one is found the 
ant gently taps the louse with its 
feelers, and the louse gives out a 
drop of honey which the ant drinks. 
Ants also carry off these lice and 
shut them up in cells in their houses, 
taking great care of them, and 
feeding them, just as we take care 
of our cattle. They carry off too 
and keep the larvae of a kind of 
beetle, from the long hairs of which 
they suck some kind of juice, of 
which they appear to be very fond. 
In warm countries, where ants are 
large and plentiful, they kill and eat 
insects, birds, and small animals, 
and sometimes even drive people 
from towns. In the warm parts of 
America is a small shining red ant 
called the fire-ant, whose sting is 
said to be like a prick from a red- 
hot needle. These ants dig gal¬ 
leries through the ground, over¬ 
run houses and eat up food and 
clothes. People who live where 
they are have to smear the legs of 
tables, chairs, and stools with co- 





ANT 


20 


ANT 


paiba balsam, which the ants do 
not like, to keep them from climbing 
up them. All food has to be hung 
up in baskets held by cords soaked 
in the same balsam, and all kinds of 
clothes have to be kept with great 
care, for they will eat even linen for 
the sake of the starch in it. Some- 


Elood-red Ant—Male. 

times these ants become such pests 
that villages are deserted by their 
inhabitants. The little red ant of 
the United States is also a great pest 
in houses, as it will eat. anything 
which has sugar in it. The large 
black ant of the United States is 
very destructive, eating food, books, 
wooden things, furs, etc. 

In some hot countries are large 
flesh-eating ants which hunt for 
prey in great armies. Wherever 
they go all other animals are fright¬ 
ened and try to get out of their way. 
As they move along in a thick mass 
they search under every leaf and 
piece of rotten wood for spiders, 
grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, 
maggots, and other insects, and 


Blood-red Ant—Female. 

clear the ground of all animal mat¬ 
ter, alive or dead. When they find 
wasps’ nests on low bushes they 
run up and gnaw through the cov¬ 
ering of the nest to get at the larvae 
within, without paying any attention 
to the angry wasps flying about 
them. When they have gathered all 


the food they want, they march 
homeward again, each one carry¬ 
ing his part of the prey for the use 
of the society. In South America 
these ants do a great deal of good 
by eating up insects, and people are 
very glad to have them come into 
their houses, which in hot weather 
are full of all kinds of insects that 
bite and sting. When the army of 
ants is seen coming the people 
leave their houses, and the ants go in 
and search every part, peeping into 
corners and cracks, dragging all liv¬ 
ing things out and killing them. 
When they have been through the 
whole house, they set off again 
dragging away with them cock¬ 
roaches, centipedes, and even liz¬ 
ards and any other thing which they 
can carry. 

Some ants make war on other 
kinds of ants and carry off their 



Blood-red Ant—Worker. 

young and make slaves of them. 
These fighting ants, which are red, 
are mostly idle stupid fellows who 
do not know how to take care of 
themselves, and who would starve 
to death if they did not have slaves 
to look after them ; but their nip¬ 
pers are very sharp and strong, and 
well fitted for fighting. The pictures 
show the male, the worker, and the 
female of these red warrior ants. 
The ants on which they make war 
are active little black ones, who live 
in well-built houses, and who are 
hard workers. When some of the 
red ants find one of these colonies, 
they go home and tell their friends 
of it, and then the red ant army sets 
out to attack the enemy’s fort. As 
soon as the black ant sentinels see 
them coming they rush into the 
fort, give the alarm, and then rush 
quickly out again followed by great 







ANT 


21 


ANT 


numbers of other black ants, who 
fight the invaders bravely, but in 
vain. The red ants are the best sol¬ 
diers, and they soon overcome the 
black ones and press into the fort. 
The blacks fly in all directions, and 
in a few minutes the reds are seen 
coming out again, each one carrying 
in its mouth an egg or a larva of 
the black colony. With these they 
march home, where they bring up 
their prisoners to serve them, treat¬ 
ing them the same as their own 
children. They never carry off the 
grown-up ants, who would prob¬ 


ably run away when they got a 
chance. As soon as the black ant 
children grow up they do all the 
work of the household, and take the 
best of care of their masters. They 
lick them, brush them, feed them, 
and carry them around on their 
backs. The masters, who do noth¬ 
ing but carry on war, become so 
used to being waited on that if they 
lost their slaves the stupid creatures 
would die in the midst of plenty. 

A kind of ant in Texas is said to 
build cities and roads, and to keep a 
regular army. They first clear away 



Nests of Termite Ants. 


the grass for three or four feet 
around their city, and then make a 
pavement on it of coarse sand and 
gravel. As this would be covered 
with water in the rainy season, they 
build mounds on it, about a foot 
high, and in these they make cells in 
which their eggs, young ones, and 
their stores of grain are carried when 
the rains begin. The only plant al¬ 
lowed to grow in the bounds of their 
city is a kind of grain-bearing grass, 
whose seeds they gather when ripe 
and put away for use. 


Ants have many enemies. Birds 
and some kinds of animals eat great 
numbers of them, and there is a 
Small fly which lays its eggs on 
their bodies, and when they hatch 
out the larvae go into the bodies and 
live there. There is also a small 
kind of ant which makes chambers 
and galleries in the walls of the nests 
of some larger kinds. They are the 
bitter foes of the large ants, and 
often rush out into their nurseries 
and carry off some of the larvae for 
food. It is just as if there was a 








ANT 


22 


ANTELOPE 


race of ugly dwarfs living in the 
walls of our houses, who would 
every now and then carry off a 
baby to eat. The large ants can¬ 
not get at these pests, because 
they are too large to go into their 
holes. 

Termites, or white ants, are like 
common ants in their habits, but 
differ from them in many things. 
They live mostly in very hot coun¬ 
tries, and do a great deal of injury, 
as they eat up everything that can 
be eaten which comes in their way. 
They will sometimes gnaw out all 
the inside of the beams in houses, 
leaving only a thin shell. In Africa 
these white ants live together in 
vast colonies, some burrowing in 
wood, some digging deep houses 
underground, and some building up 
great hills ten or twelve feet high 
above ground, with little hills around 
them, like those in the picture. The 
one on the right hand is cut down 
through the middle to show how the 
inside is made. These hills are built 
of earth softened in the jaws of the 
worker ants, and which when plas¬ 
tered on dries and becomes so hard 
that a man can stand on the top 
without breaking through. Hunt¬ 
ers looking for game, and even wild 
animals searching for prey, some¬ 
times mount on to them to get a 
view of the country. The Africans 
eat these ants, pounding them up 
into a kind of jam, which they think 
very delicious. There is also an ani¬ 
mal called the scaly ant-eater, which 
feeds on them. It tears open the 
hills of the white ants, which it 
licks up with its long, round, sticky 
tongue. 

Ants belong to the order hymen - 
optera , or membrane-winged IN¬ 
SECTS ; but termites, or white ants, 
belong to the order neuroptera , or 
nerve-winged insects. 

The word ant is changed from 
amt , which was shortened from 
emmet , the old English name of the 
ant. The Anglo-Saxon name is 
amet. 


ANTELOPE. Many antelopes are 
so like deer that they can scarcely 
be told from them, but deer have 
solid horns which they shed every 
ear, while antelopes have hollow 
orns, like those of sheep, goats, 
and oxen, which are usually not 
shed at all. Antelopes’ horns, too, 
are round and curved, have rings or 
wrinkles running round them, and 
are always black. There are a great 
many kinds of antelopes, most of 
which are found in Africa, but there 
are also many in Asia ; there is only 
one kind in Europe, and there are 
two kinds in North America. 

The Gazelles are the most beauti¬ 
ful and the fleetest of the antelopes 
of Africa. They are usually quite 
small, one kind being no larger than 
a hare, though some are as large as 
deer. They are famed for the beauty 
of their eyes and for the grace of 
their movements. 

The Gnu, or horned-horse of South 
Africa, is about as large as the ass, 
and has a body, neck, mane, and tail 
like a horse, and the legs and horns 
of an antelope. 

The Chamois, the only antelope 
in Europe, is found in the Pyrenees, 
in the Alps, and in other moun¬ 
tains. It is something like a large 
goat, but has no beard, and it has 
two smooth black horns, about six 
inches long, rising straight up from 
the top of the brow, and bending 
backward at the top. The chamois 
does not like heat, and stays on the 
highest ridges and snowy valleys of 
the mountains, living on herbs and 
the shoots of shrubs. It is very 
swift, and easily bounds from rock 
to rock, going up and down steep 
cliffs where other animals could not 
keep their feet. The chamois is 
much hunted, although the sport 
is very dangerous, and the animal is 
not worth much when killed, its flesh 
not being very good. Its skin is 
dressed into a fine leather called 
chamois or shammy skin, which is 
used for under garments, and for 
cleaning silver plate, glass, etc. ; 




ANTELOPE 


23 


ANVIL 


but most of the leather sold for 
chamois skin is made of buck 
skin. 

The Prong-horn, one of the ante¬ 
lopes of North America, is about as 
large as the common deer, and has 
coarse hair, yellowish-brown above, 
and white on the rump and under 
parts. The hoofs, horns, and end of 
the nose are black. The horns, 
which grow nearly straight up and 
bend toward each other at the top, 
have each a single branch or prong 
about half way up, and from this the 
animal gets its name. The prong¬ 
horn is often seen by travellers on 
the Pacific Railway. One will some¬ 
times run beside a train for a mile or 
two, as if trying to run a race with 
it. Its speed is so great that it is 
almost useless to chase it; but it is 
not a hard animal to kill, because it 
has so much curiosity that if the 
hunter waves a handkerchief it will 
come near enough to be shot. The 
Indians lie flat on their backs and 
kick up their heels, with a rag or 
some other thing fastened to them, 
and the prong-horns, coming up to 
see what the strange thing is, get 
near enough to be killed with the 
bow and arrow. 

The Rocky Mountain Goat, the 

other American antelope, lives in 
the wildest and most rugged parts 
of the Rocky Mountains, seldom 
coming down into the plains. It 
is about as large as a sheep, and 
it has a beard like a goat, but its 
horns are like those of the chamois. 
Its body is covered next to the skin 
with a fine silk-like wool, and over 
this are long shaggy hairs. 

The antelope is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia , or cud-chewing 
animals, and of a family which in¬ 
cludes the gazelle, the chamois, the 
gnu, the Rocky Mountain goat, and 
many others. 

The word antelope comes from 
the Greek antholops , which is made 
up from anthos, beauty, and ops, the 
eye, and the animal thus gets its 
name from the beauty of its eyes. 


ANTIMONY, a metal, and one 
of the ELEMENTS. When pure, anti¬ 
mony is a brittle, bluish-white metal, 
which shines bright. It is very 
brittle, and may easily be pounded 
to powder in a mortar. It is some¬ 
times found by itself, but oftener 
united with other things, such as 
arsenic, nickel, silver, and sulphur. 
Most of the antimony of commerce 
is got from an ore called gray anti¬ 
mony, in which it is largely mixed 
with sulphur. It is made mostly in 
Germany, from ores found there, 
and in Great Britain, from ores 
brought from Borneo and Sumatra. 
Antimony is given as a medicine, 
chiefly in the form of a white pow¬ 
der called tartar emetic. It is not 
used in the arts as a simple metal, 
but makes a part of many ALLOYS. 
Among these are type metal and 
the metal used in making music 
plates and stereotype plates, Britan¬ 
nia metal, and pewter. 

The word antimony comes from 
the new Latin antimonium. 

ANTHRACITE. See Coal. 

ANVIL, an iron block with a 
smooth face and a horn, or pointed 
end, on which smiths hammer and 
shape their work. Anvils are of 
many sizes, from the small ones 
used by goldsmiths, which are made 
of steel, to the immense cast-iron 



Blacksmith’s Anvil. 

ones used under steam HAMMERS, 
which are so large and heavy that 
they have to be put upon stone 
piers built in the most solid manner 
in deep holes dug in the earth. 
Common anvils are made of cast- 
iron covered with steel. Some have 







APE 


24 


APPLE 


a hole in them, made when they are 
cast, to let the air in so that they 
may cool quickly, as this makes them 
harder. 

In the picture, A is the face of 
the anvil, B is the horn, and C is a 
groove in which a piece of iron can 
be shaped round. This piece, which 
fits into a square hole in the face, 
can be taken off, and a short chisel, 
on which a bar of iron may be cut 
in two, put in its place. 

The word anvil comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon anfilt. 

APE, a kind of monkey without a 
tail. When an ape stands upon its 
hind legs, its arms almost touch the 
ground. The fingers and toes are 
the same on the feet as on the 
hands, so that apes really have four 
hands. They can thus grasp the 
limbs of trees with great ease, and 
jump from bough to bough without 
danger of falling. When wild they 
are the spryest of all creatures. 
Many of their actions are much like 
those of human beings, whom they 
often mimic. When they rest they 
do not squat down, like other monk¬ 
eys, but stretch themselves out at 
full length with their heads on their 
hands, or on something for a pillow. 
Other animals fight with their teeth 
and claws, but apes will throw 
stones and use sticks and clubs like 
man. 

The Gorilla is the strongest, fierc¬ 
est, and most active of the apes. 
It is found only in the wilds of the 
hottest parts of Africa. When it 
stands upright, it is as tall and as 
large as a man. The male gorilla 
is very ferocious, and when wounded 
it is said to be more terrible than 
the lion. It can twist a musket bar¬ 
rel in its jaws, and kill a man with 
one blow of its paw. When attack¬ 
ing an enemy, gorillas walk on their 
hind legs, beat their breasts with 
their arms, and roar loudly. Sev¬ 
eral young gorillas have been taken 
alive, but none of them have lived 
long, for they cannot be tamed. 

The Chimpanzee, another very 


large ape, nearly as tall as a man, is 
found only in Africa. It is the 
cleverest of all the apes, and the 
most like man. Chimpanzees live 
in societies in the forests, where 
they build huts of bark, branches, 
and leaves. They join together in 
bodies to defend their homes, and 
drive off even elephants with clubs 
and stones. 

The Orang-outang is also nearly 
as high as a man when it stands up, 
and is even stronger than the chim¬ 
panzee. It is found in Southern 
Asia and in the islands of Borneo 
and Sumatra. Orang-outangs build 
nests in trees, and do not leave 
them in the morning until the sun 
has dried up the dew and warmed 
the air. They do not live in troops, 
like the chimpanzee, excepting when 
a pair have a family. They live 
mostly on fruits, nuts, and tender 
shoots, and spend much of their 
time in trees. Orang-outangs may 
be tamed, and they are often affec¬ 
tionate in captivity, but are generally 
grave and sober. 

The ape is a mammal of the order 
quadrianaiia , or four-handed ani¬ 
mals, and belongs to the same fam¬ 
ily with the MONKEY. 

The word ape comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon apa. 

APPLE. There were no apples 
in America when it was first settled, 
but the English brought trees, and 
they are now plenty all over the 
United States. Apples that grow 
in the Eastern States are richer in 
taste than those from the Western 
States, though Western apples are 
larger and better looking. Ameri¬ 
can apples are now sent in large 
quantities to Europe, China, and 
India. The kinds most sent are 
Rhode Island Greenings, Baldwins, 
Newtown Pippins, Spitzenbergs, and 
Swaars. Crab apples, which are not 
larger than plums, are much used 
for preserves. The Siberian crab 
apple is the best. All the kinds of 
apples now known are supposed to 
have grown from the wild crab 





APRICOT 


25 


AQUARIUM 


apple tree. Apple-tree wood is 
much used by turners, mostly for 
making shoe lasts and weaver’s 
shuttles. (See Cider.) 

The word apple comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon appel. 

APRICOT, a fruit that looks like 
a peach, but has the stone of a 
plum. The tree grows wild in 
Northern Africa, and in China, Ja¬ 
pan, and other eastern countries. 
It was first brought into Europe in 
the time of Alexander the Great. 
Apricots are dried in large quantities 
in Italy, and sent to foreign coun¬ 
tries. Many also are dried in Bok¬ 
hara and other parts of the East, 
and sent to Russia, and the pre¬ 
served apricots of Damascus are fa¬ 
mous. The apricots that come 
from France in boxes, dried and 
preserved with sugar, are the fruit 
of the apricot plum. A black paint, 
like India ink, is made from burned 
apricot stones. Many apricots are 
now raised in California. 

The word apricot comes from the 
old English apricock , which is from 
the Latin prcecox , meaning early 
ripe. 

AQUA FORTIS. See Nitric 
Acid. 

AQUARIUM, a tank for keeping 
water animals and plants in. It was 
once thought necessary to change 
the water every few days in the glass 
vessels in which fish and other 
water animals are kept, because 
when water animals breathe they 
use up oxygen and give out car¬ 
bonic acid just as land animals do, 
and this in a short time makes the 
water impure. But about fifty years 
ago (1830) a French gentleman, M. 
Charles des Moulins, found out that 
if water plants are put into the 
water with the animals the plants 
will take up the carbonic acid and 
give off the oxygen which the ani¬ 
mals need, just as is done in rivers 
and lakes, as is told about in Air. 
Thus the water is kept pure, and 
there is no need of changing it. At 
first only fresh-water tanks were 


made, in which fresh-water animals 
and plants were kept, but it was 
soon found out that salt-water 
plants and animals could be kept 
and studied in the same way, and 
now many cities have large build¬ 
ings filled with aquaria in which are 
kept all kinds of living things from 
seas and lakes. These give much 
amusement to the people, and fur¬ 
nish to scientific men the means of 
studying the habits and modes of 
life of many animals of which but 
little was before known. 

Small aquaria are now often kept 
in houses for study and amusement, 
just as cages of birds are kept. 
They are usually fresh-water ones, 
as those with salt water are much 
harder to take care of. The one in 
the picture is a very good form. 
The bottom is made of marble, slate, 
or a sheet of zinc ; the framework 
is of bronze or iron, and the four 
sides of plate glass. The glasses 
must be fitted into the frame very 
tightly, and fastened with water ce¬ 
ment, so that the tank will not 
leak. On the bottom should be put 
about an inch of well-washed river 
sand, and on this pebbles should be 
strewn. No clay or other dirt should 
be put in, as it is apt to color the 
water. A little mountain or a grotto 
may be easily made with broken 
stone stuck together with water ce¬ 
ment. A part of it should come 
above the water, for turtles and 
other little animals to crawl out 
upon. If shells are put in they 
should be first burned or well 
washed, so as to get all the animal 
matter out of them. Fresh-water 
plants, such as starwort, water 
crowfoot, duckweed, water thyme, 
and milfoil, should have their roots 
covered with the sand, and have a 
few pebbles put over them to keep 
them in place. Care must be taken 
not to put too many animals in a 
small aquarium, as there may not be 
air enough in the water for all. 
Among the most interesting and 
pretty of the small fishes for a fresh* 





AQUARIUM 


26 


AQUARIUM 


water aquarium are the stickleback, 
gold fish, perch, minnow, tench, and 
gudgeon. Some small turtles are 
interesting, and a few MOLLUSKS, 
such as snails and mussels, should 
be put in, as they help to purify the 
water, by using up decaying vege¬ 
table matter. 

The aquarium should not be let 
stand in the sunlight too much, as 
it will warm the water, which ought 
to be kept cooler than common sit¬ 
ting rooms in winter (the best heat 
is 50° to 6o"). Every few days the 


| water should be a.ired by dipping it 
I up in a cup and pouring it gently 
back into the tank in a small stream 
or by blowing into it with a bellows. 
Nature does this by constant evapo¬ 
ration and rain, and also by the in¬ 
terchange from springs through 
brooks and rivers to the sea. Air 
thus becomes mixed with the water, 
and the animals have more to 
breathe. If an animal or plant die 
it should be taken out at once, for 
the water will be made impure by 
it. Some aquaria are made so that 



Aquarium. 


a little fresh water is always running 
in at the top while a small pipe car¬ 
ries off a little from the bottom. 

A salt-water aquarium should be 
taken care of in much the same way 
as a fresh-water one. Those who 
live near the sea can easily get new 
water if that in the aquarium be¬ 
comes impure ; and those who live 
at a distance can make it pure again 
by straining it through a sponge. 
Air must also be often put into the 
water just as in fresh-water aquaria. 


Of course a salt-water aquarium 
must have in it only things which 
grow in salt water. Everything will 
thrive if you are careful to have 
about as much vegetable as animal 
matter ; and it is always better to 
have a few healthy animals than 
many weak ones. 

Green dulce or sea-cabbage is 
the best of the sea plants to use, 
and it is well to put in a few stones 
as large as hens’ eggs covered with 
green seaweed. Brown and red sea- 














AQUEDUCT 


27 


ARABESQUE 


weeds are not so good. Sponges 
soon die in an aquarium, and spoil 
the water. Among the animals 
good for a salt-water aquarium are 
small fishes, such as minnows and 
sticklebacks, shrimp, snails, bar¬ 
nacles, and a few sea anemones. 
Sea anemones are a kind of animal 
plants, which have stems somewhat 
like the stem of a toadstool, with a 
jelly-like flower on the top. These 
flowers, which are of many colors, 
blue, dark red, pink and white, yel¬ 
low, etc., are really feelers, which 
stand out all round like a star, and 
with which the animal catches its 
food. Anemones fasten themselves 
to rocks on the bottom of the sea, 
with their flower feelers open, and 
when a little fish just hatched or a 
worm comes along, the feelers close 
up, shut it in, and carry it into its 
mouth, which is in the middle of 
the flower. It is very interesting to 
watch the movements of anemones, 
which should be fed every day with 
small pieces of dried meat, which 
may be dropped upon their feelers. 
They will take a great many differ¬ 
ent shapes, sometimes looking like 
a full-blown flower, sometimes like 
a bud, and sometimes like a whole 
vase of flowers. In the picture, 
which is that of a salt-water aquari¬ 
um, are shown two anemones, fast¬ 
ened to the bottom, and spreading 
out their flower-like heads. 

The word aquarium (plural aqua¬ 
ria) is made from the Latin word 
aqua , water. 

AQUEDUCT, a channel to carry 
water, generally for the supply of 
cities and for other purposes. The 
aqueducts of the Romans, some of 
which are still in use, were among 
the greatest of their works, some of 
them being more than sixty miles 
long. They were built with a slight 
but regular slope, so that water 
would easily run down them. Where 
they crossed valleys or other low 
places they were placed upon high 
arches of stone ; where hills were in 
the way they were sometimes built 


round them and sometimes through 
them in tunnels. Some of the 
aqueducts had several channels, so 
that two or three different streams 
of water flowed through them. The 
largest aqueduct in the United States 
is that which brings the water of the 
Croton river to New York City. It 
is forty miles long, and passes 
through sixteen tunnels, cut mostly 
through solid rock. The channel 
through which the water flows is 
high enough for the tallest man to 
walk in. It is carried over the Har¬ 
lem river on the High Bridge, which 
is more than a quarter of a mile long 
and higher than two four story 
houses (116 feet). The water flows 
into the reservoirs in Central Park, 
and is carried from there in pipes all 
through the city. Boston is sup¬ 
plied with water through the Cochit- 
uate Aqueduct, which is about fif¬ 
teen miles long. There are many 
aqueducts on the Erie Canal, by 
means of which the waters of the 
canal are carried over rivers and val¬ 
leys. These, which would be more 
properly called aqueduct bridges, as 
a canal itself is an aqueduct, are 
much wider and larger than those 
built to carry water to cities, and are 
open at the top. 

The word aqueduct is from the 
Latin aquaductus , which is made 
up of aqua, water, and ductus, a 
leading. 

ARABESQUE, a kind of decora¬ 
tion in architecture, largely used by 



Arabesques. 


the Spanish Moors or Arabs, from 
whom it got its name. As the Mo¬ 
hammedan religion forbade the mak- 







ARCH 


28 


ARROWROOT 


ing of pictures of animals, the 
Moorish arabesques were made up 
of vines and plants, leaves, flowers, 
and fruit, twisted together in all 
sorts of figures. Those of the pal¬ 
ace of the Alhambra, in Granada, 
Spain, are the most beautiful and 
most famous of the Moorish ara¬ 
besques. Animals, birds, insects, 
and even human figures are now put 
into arabesque decorations, which 
are much used in fresco painting. 

The word arabesque is French, 
and is from the Latin Arabicus t 
Arabian. 

ARCH. The arch shown in the 
picture is a semi-circular (half-circle) 
arch. It is formed of wedge-shaped 
blocks piled up from two sides, fac¬ 
ing each other, with the narrow part 
of the wedge on the inside, so that 
the blocks on the two sides come 
nearer and nearer to each other 
until they meet at the top. The 



Fig. i.—Semi-circular or Round Arch. 

stone in the middle, K, is called the 
keystone, because it locks the whole 
together ; if it were taken out the 
arch would fall down. The two bot¬ 
tom stones, S S, are the springers, 
and the flat stones under the spring¬ 
ers are called the imposts or plat¬ 
bands. The distance across the 
widest part of the arch on the line C 
is the span, and the distance be¬ 
tween the span and the keystone is 
the height. In building an arch a 
wooden frame is first put up, shaped 
on the top just like the arch, and 
the stones are piled up on it until 
they meet at the top and the key¬ 
stone is put in, when the frame¬ 


work is taken down, and the arch 
stands by itself. The ancients 
knew how to make only the round 



Fig. 2.—Horseshoe Arch. 


arch, like the one in the picture. 
The Arabs first made the horseshoe 
arch, Fig. 2, which is used so much 



in Moorish architecture. The pointed 
or Gothic arch, Fig. 3, was first built 
in the middle ages. 

The word arch is from the Latin 
arcus , a bow. 

ARROWROOT, a starch used as 
food, made from the roots and grains 
of several plants. The best arrow- 
root is got from the roots of a plant 
largely cultivated in the West India 
islands. The roots, which are about 
a foot long and as large as a man’s 
finger, are carefully peeled and beat¬ 
en or ground to a pulp, and then 
washed in water, which takes out the 
starch ; this settles, and after an¬ 
other washing is dried in the sun. 
Arrowroot is made also in the East 
Indies, but that prepared in Bermuda 
and Jamaica is the best. Arrowroot 
which we buy in stores is often mixed 






























ARSENIC 


29 


ASHES 


with starch made from potatoes, 
wheat, or rice, and with sago flour. 

Arrowroot is supposed to have got 
its name from the use of its roots by 
the Indians to cure wounds made by 
poisoned arrows. 

ARSENIC, a metal, and one of 
the elements. When pure, arsenic 
is a shining, steel-gray, hard, and 
brittle metal. The white powder, 
commonly called arsenic, is an oxide 
or rust of this metal. It is made 
chiefly in Silesia, in Germany, by 
heatinganore called arsenical pyrites. 
The fumes or vapors which rise from 
it pass into a cold chamber where 
they are changed into the form of a 
white powder. 

Arsenic is a deadly poison, and 
when taken into the stomach causes 
burning pain, vomiting, and cramps. 
The workmen who make it are very 
unhealthy. It is used to some extent 
in making flint GLASS, SHOT, and in 
other manufactures. When mixed 
with copper it makes a beautiful 
green, used in coloring paper hang¬ 
ings, but these are very unhealthful, 
and ought not to be put upon walls. 

The word arsenic is from the Greek 
arsenikon, which is made from arsen, 
strong. The name is given to it be¬ 
cause it is a strong poison. 

ARTICHOKE, a plant something 
like a thistle, part of which is used 
for food. It is supposed to have first 
come from Asia, but it was known 
in Europe as early as the middle of 
the sixteenth century. The unripe 
flower-heads are boiled, and the 
fleshy lower part of the scales or 
leaves eaten, dipped in olive oil or 
butter with a little salt and pepper. 

The Jerusalem Artichoke is a kind 
of sunflower, with a root like a po¬ 
tato. It came first from Brazil, but 
was known in England about the be¬ 
ginning of the seventeenth century. 
The root, the part eaten, is cooked 
like the potato, or eaten raw cut up 
with vinegar and salt. 

The word artichoke is made from 
the Armenian words ardi schauki , 
meaning earth-thorn. The Jerusalem 


artichoke does not get its name from 
the city of Jerusalem, but from 
girasole , the Italian name of sun¬ 
flower, which has been thus changed 
in turning it into English. 

ASAFGETIDA, a kind of gum with 
a very strong smell and a bitter taste, 
the dried juice of a plant which 
grows in Persia and India. Cuts are 
made in the roots of the plant, and 
the milky juice which runs out is 
then dried in the sun. The gum 
varies in color from red to pink and 
white. It is used in medicine in 
cases of colic, wind in the stomach, 
asthma, etc. In some parts of the 
East asafcetida is used to season 
food. 

The word asafoetida is made up 
from the new Latin asa , a gum, and 
the Latin fcetidus , fetid or stinking. 

ASH, a forest tree common in 
Europe and North America. There 
are about fifty kinds of it. The most 
important ones in the United States 
are the white ash, the black ash, the 
red ash, the blue ash, and the swamp 
ash. The white ash has the best 
wood ; it is very hard, tough, springy, 
and straight-grained, and is much 
valued by wheelwrights, carriage- 
makers, ship-builders, joiners, and 
turners. Ploughs and other farm¬ 
ing tools are made of it, and it is the 
best wood for heavy oars, and one 
of the best for bows. The tree bear¬ 
ing a red berry, which is called 
the mountain ash in the northern 
United States, is not a real ash, but 
belongs to another family of trees. 
The manna of commerce, used as a 
medicine, is a sugar from the sap of 
a kind of ash tree growing in south¬ 
ern Europe. It is collected princi¬ 
pally in Sicily. 

The word ash is from the Anglo- 
Saxon asc. 

ASHES. When a tree grows it 
takes up from the earth, by means 
of its roots, certain minerals called 
SALTS. These salts, which all plants 
need as much as they do air, become 
a part of the wood of the tree. 
When a stick of wood is burned, the 





ASPARAGUS 


30 


AUCTION 


most of it is turned into gas, and 
goes off into the air. All that is left 
is the ashes, which cannot burn, 
they being only the salts which the 
tree took up from the earth when 
growing. If the ashes be spread 
over the ground, the salts will go 
back into the earth again, and this is 
the reason why wood ashes make 
good manure for land : the salts 
which have been taken from it by 
growing plants are given back to it 
in the ashes, and help other trees 
and plants to grow. Some kinds of 
wood give more ashes when burned 
than others. Willow wood gives 
more than twice as much as oak, 
and about one fourth more than 
elm. The bark of all trees makes 
more ashes than the solid wood. 
The salts found in ashes are val¬ 
uable and are much used in the 
arts. The most used is POTASH, 
with which SOAP is made. Ashes 
are also used in bleaching, dyeing, 
and glass-making; and they are 
sometimes mixed with MORTAR. 
When mixed with salt, ashes make 
a very hard cement. The ashes 
thrown out of volcanoes are not 
real ashes ; they are only dust and 
powdered stone. 

The word ashes comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon asca. 

ASPARAGUS, a plant grown in 
gardens for the sake of its tender 
juicy shoots, which are cooked and 
eaten. There was no asparagus in 
America before it was settled by 
Europeans. It grows wild in West¬ 
ern Asia and in Europe, but was 
early cultivated in gardens by the 
Greeks and Romans, who made 
great use of it for the table. It was 
not eaten in England until about the 
time of Charles I. Asparagus is not 
worth much for food, but is easily 
digested. 

The word asparagus is from the 
Greek asparagos, from a , up, and 
spartan, to swell with sap or juice. 

ASPHALT, or ASPHALTUM, a 

kind of mineral pitch or solid BITU¬ 
MEN. When pure it is something 


like resin, both in color and hard¬ 
ness, but it is usually black or very 
dark brown. Asphalt is much used 
for making pavements. It is melted 
in boilers, mixed with sand and 
gravel, and spread evenly, with 
heavy rollers, and when cool makes 
a hard solid pavement. A kind of 
black varnish is made from the best 
asphaltum, which is used to enamel 
the leather called “ patent leather.” 
Artificial asphaltum is made from 
the coal tar of gas-works. 

The word asphalt is from the 
Greek asphaltos , bitumen. 

ASS. This animal was first found 
in Asia, and it still runs wild in the 
mountains of Persia and Armenia. 
In ancient times the Persian kings 
used to hunt asses, and their flesh 
was thought to be excellent for food. 
The best asses are still brought from 
the East, or from Spain, where they 
are raised with great care. The ass 
is smaller than the horse, and has a 
rough shaggy coat of hair, and very 
large ears. It is sure-footed, eats 
coarse food, and will safely carry 
loads over stony mountainous regions 
where the horse cannot go. The 
ass does not neigh like the horse, 
but brays like the mule. The skin 
of the ass is very tough, and is used 
for covering drum-heads, making 
pocket-books, etc. A kind of grained 
leather, called shagreen, is made 
from it in Astrakhan, a Russian city. 

The ass is a mammal of the order 
pachydermata , or thick-skinned ani¬ 
mals, and of the horse family. 

The word ass is from the Latin 
asinus. 

AUCTION, a public sale of prop¬ 
erty to the person who offers the 
highest price. The salesman is 
called the auctioneer. The people 
who go to the auction make bids, 
or offers, one after the other, for the 
property, which is given to the one 
who bids the most money. Sales by 
auction were first made by the 
Romans, who sold the spoils taken 
in war in this way. They first called 
such a sale a sale under the spear, 







AUGER 


3 i 


AUGER 


because a spear was stuck up in 
the ground beside the goods ; but 
they afterwards called it audio , 
which means an increasing, because 
each one who bid increased the sum 
offered by the one who bid before 
him. Perhaps, as many spears had 
little flags on them, an auctioneer’s 
red flag may have grown out of the 
early use of the spear. 

AUGER. There are many kinds 
of instruments for boring holes in 
wood. The Brad-awl, which is the 
simplest, is a round wire 
with a wedge-shaped edge. 
Some awls are made three- 
cornered, and some four¬ 
sided and pointed. The 
last is the kind mostly used 
by those who make bird 
cages. Awls do not cut 
out any wood when they 
make a hole, but only push 
some of it aside. Awls for 
making holes in leather, 
used by harness-makers 
and shoemakers, are curved 
or bent. 

The Gimlet bores in a 
different way. It has a 
sharp screw-point at its 
end, by which it is drawn 
into the wood, when it is 
turned round, instead of 
being pushed in like the 
awl. As it goes in its sharp 
edge cuts a shaving from 
the wood round and round, 
and this shaving goes up 
the hollow of the twisted 

Auger, part of the gimlet, which is 
called the pod. 

The Auger, like the gimlet, has a 
screw-point and a spiral or twisted 
pod, but it has also a cutting part 
called a lip, at each side of the end 
of the pod, as shown in the picture. 
These lips have sharp side edges, 
which cut the hole round, and there 
are other sharp edges on the bottom 
of the auger, called the floor-lips, 
which deepen the hole by cutting 
downward. The chips or shavings 
pass up the hollow spiral part of the 


pod, as in the gimlet. The longer 
the twist of the pod is, the deeper is 
the hole which the auger can bore ; 
for if the twist is short, the auger 
has to be taken out to clear the 
shavings or chips soon after it is 
full. Some augers have lips 
of different shape, but the 
picture shows the common¬ 
est kind. Augers are made 1 
to bore holes from one half 
inch to four inches wide. 

The Auger bit differs from 
the auger in having spurs in¬ 
stead of lips, as shown in the 
second picture, where the 
points are seen pointing 
downward, instead of up¬ 
ward as in the lips of the J\ 
auger. The spurs have sharp 
edges and cut a ring round 
the bottom of the hole, so 
that the floor-lips can cut out 
the chips more easily. Spurs JEjjt 
are not usually put on augers, 
because the auger is meant 
to do coarser work than the 
bit, and the spurs might get 
broken off. There are sev- 
eral kinds of spurs used in 
auger-bits, some of which 
are curved or bent instead of g^ er 
being straight, and some are 
made with both spurs and lips. A 
kind of bit is also made with a mov¬ 
able knife having a spur on one 
side. This knife can be moved, by 
means of the screw seen in the 
picture, so that holes of different 



Bit with Movable Knife. 


sizes can be bored with it. Bits are 
made to bore holes less than a quar¬ 
ter of an inch to an inch and a half 
wide. 

Gimlets are usually made by hand, 
augers and bits by machinery. Au- 















AUGER 


32 


AXE 


gers and bits are made out of square 
rods of steel, which are hammered 
out and shaped by means of dies, 
and twisted while red hot. The 
screw-point and the lips or spurs are 
then roughly made by machines and 
finished by hand. The edges of the 
pod are ground down so as to make 
them perfectly round and even, and 
the auger is then tempered, or hard¬ 
ened, by heating it hot and cooling 
it quickly in water, and lastly fin¬ 
ished. 

Gimlets and augers are usually 
fitted with handles, by which they 



may be turned, but auger bits are 
made to be used in a brace, like that 
in the picture. The end of the brace 
is so made that the shank or back 
end of any bit will fit into it. The 
person using the brace puts the 
round part a against his breast, 
takes hold of the lower part b with 
the left hand, and turns the part c 
around with the right hand. 

The word awl is from the Anglo- 
Saxon cel. Gimlet is from the old 
French guimbelet, which is from an 


old word meaning to twist. Auger 
is from the Anglo-Saxon nafegar , 
which is from ?iafa , the nave of a 
wheel, and gar, a spear or point ; so 
that auger really means a nave-borer. 
Bit is probably from the Anglo-Sax¬ 
on bitan , to bite. 

AURORA BOREALIS, or northern 

lights, the bright clouds of light which 
are often seen in the northern sky in 
the night. Aurora is a Latin word 
meaning the light of the dawn or 
morning, and borealis, also Latin, 
means northern ; and the two to¬ 
gether mean the northern morning- 
light, because it often looks like the 
daybreak in the east. It would be 
better to call it the polar light, be¬ 
cause it is seen at the south pole as 
well as at the north pole. The 
aurora is sometimes very beautiful, 
forming across the sky great arches 
of light through which flash bright 
streaks of red, blue, green, purple, 
and yellow flame. It is not known 
exactly what causes it, but it is sup¬ 
posed to be made by electricity 
or lightning passing through bodies 
of air of different thicknesses. 

AXE. The axe is one of the most 
ancient of tools, and it has been used 
by all peoples, civilized and savage. 
It differs from the adze in having an 
edge like a wedge, instead of like a 
chisel, and in having its handle set in 
the same way with the edge instead 
of across it. Axes have long 
handles, and are meant to be used 
with both hands. The handle of an 
axe, which in this country is made of 
hickory, is rightly called the helve, 
the thick metal part the head, and 
the hole for the handle the eye. 
In rude times axes were made out 
of a piece of flint or some other 
hard stone, ground down to a sharp 
edge. The handle was made by 
twisting a stick round the head in 
much the same way as is shown in 
the picture of the stone hammer. 
Stone hatchets called tomahawks 
were much used by the North Amer¬ 
ican Indians, before they knew 
about iron, both for cutting wood 






AXE 


33 


AXE 


and for fighting. Every Indian 
warrior carried one of these in his 
belt, and it was his principal weapon 
in hand-to-hand fights. Axes were 
also used in war by all ancient 
peoples, and many battle axes of 
stone, bronze, and iron are to be seen 
in museums. 

When people found out how to 
melt copper, axes were made out of 
that metal, and in time they learned 



Fig. i.—Ancient Bronze Axes. 


how to mix a little tin with the cop¬ 
per and so to make bronze. Great 
numbers of copper and bronze axes 
have come down to us from old 
times, some of which are very well 
made and of good form. Two kinds 
of bronze axes are shown in the pic¬ 
tures, in which it will be seen that 
the helves are fastened in different 
ways. Copper and bronze axes had 
been used for a longtime before men 
found out how to make iron ones. 



Fig. 2.—Axe ready for the Steel Edge. 

The axe of modern times is made 
of hammered wrought-lRON, but its 
cutting edge is of steel. Such an 
axe is not only cheaper than one 
made wholly of steel, but it is also 
better, for it is much stronger. An 
axe or hatchet made wholly of steel 
would be more apt to break, on ac¬ 
count of the greater brittleness of 
steel. 


In making an axe a piece of bar iron 
is heated red hot, cut off the right 
length, and punched through by a 
machine to make the eye. It is then 
heated again, pressed between DIES 



Fig. 3.—Yankee Axe. 


to give it the right shape, and 
grooved on the edge to make a place 
for the piece of steel which is to form 
the sharp edge. Its shape at this 
time is much like that in Fig. 2. 

The steel edge is put in while both 
parts are at a white heat, and the 
two are hammered together under 



Fig. 4.—Kentucky Axe. 


a trip hammer, and drawn out till 
the edge is of the right shape. After 
being ground to a finer edge it is 
tempered by being heated and cooled 
quickly in water, and is then ground 
and polished. When finished it is 
stamped, and the head is blacked 
with a mixture of turpentine and 



Fig. 5.—Brazil Axe. 


asphaltum to keep it from rusting, 
and then packed for sale. 

The largest axe factory in the 
world is that of Collins & Company, 
I at Collinsville, Connecticut. Axes 










AXE 


34 


AXE 


and hatchets made there are sent to 
all parts of the world. They are so 
much better than the axes made in 
Europe that a great many false ones 
are manufactured, especially in Ger¬ 
many, and sold for true Collins axes. 
Different shaped axes are made for 



Fig. 6,—Ecuador Axe. 


different countries. Two kinds are 
used in the United States : in the 
Northern States the Yankee axe, 
shown in Fig. 3, is used, but in 
most parts of the United States south 
of the Ohio River the Kentucky 
axe, shown in Fig. 4, is liked best. 
In the different countries of South 



Fig. 7.—Cooper’s Hatchet. 


The Broad Axe, which has a very 
wide blade, is used by ship carpen¬ 
ters for shaping the timbers of ships, 
and by house carpenters, in places 
where sawed timber cannot be had, 
for hewing out the frames of houses. 

A Hatchet is a little axe with a 
short handle, made to be used with 
one hand. There are many kinds, 



Fig. 8.—Lathing Hatchet. 


made for different uses. In the 
pictures, Fig. 7 is one used by 
coopers in making barrels and tubs ; 
Fig. 8 is a lathing hatchet, for 
nailing lathes on the inside walls of 
buildings, to hold the plaster ; and 
Fig. 9 is a shingling hatchet, for 
nailing shingles on to roofs. The 
slits in the heads of the last two are 
for drawing out nails. 



America axes of many different 
shapes are used. Most of them 
have no heads, but have the eye 
close to the top, as shown in Fig. 
5, which is the form used in Brazil, 
and in Fig. 6, which is the kind used 
in Ecuador. 


The word axe is from the Anglo- 
Saxon word eax , which came from 
axine t the Greek name of the axe. 
Hatchet is from the French word 
hachette , a little axe, a small form 
of hache , an axe, which is made 
from hacher , to chop. 











B 


BABOON, a kind of monkey with 
a very short tail, found mostly in 
Africa. Baboons are among the 
largest of the monkeys, and their 
strength is very great. They are 
ugly and fierce, cunning, and danger¬ 
ous when attacked. Their fore and 
hind limbs are of nearly the same 
length, so that they run well on the 
ground ; they are also good climb¬ 
ers and live a good part of the time 
in trees. Their food is mostly fruits, 
twigs, and roots, but they some¬ 
times eat birds, lizards, and other 
small prey. There are several 
kinds, among which the pig-faced 
and the dog-faced baboons and the 
mandrill are the largest and fiercest. 

The baboon is a mammal of the 
order quadrumana , or four-handed 
animals, and of the same family 
with the monkey and ape. 

The baboon is so called on ac¬ 
count of its large lips. The word is 
from the French babouin, which is 
from babines, the large lips of a 
beast. 

BACON, the cured sides of the 
hog. The thin parts of the ribs and 
belly make the best bacon. It is 
cured by rubbing into the flesh a 
mixture made of eight parts of salt 
and one part of saltpetre, every day 
for about three weeks, the meat 
being always kept in a cool place. 
Sometimes a little brown sugar is 
added to give it flavor. When the 
salting is done, the bacon is either 
dried or smoked. 

The word bacon is from the new 
Latin baco, meaning ham or salt 
pork. 


BADCER, an animal about as 
large as a small pig, but fatter in 
the body and with very short legs 
and a long sharp nose. It lives in 
Europe and in the northern parts 
of Asia and of North America, but 
not in South America. The Amer¬ 
ican badger is yellowish-brown, 
marked sometimes with darker and 
sometimes with lighter colors, and 
its hair is long and coarse. It lives 
in burrows in the ground and feeds 
on roots, insects, birds’ eggs, frogs, 
marmots, and other small animals. 
On the plains of the West, it digs so 
many holes in following its prey that 
horses are often hurt by breaking 
through into them. It uses its nose 
and fore paws in digging, and 
pushes the earth back with its hind 
feet. Badger skins are sometimes 
used for covering soldiers’ knap¬ 
sacks and the pistol cases on their 
saddles, and the hair is made into 
shaving and paint brushes. 

The badger is a MAMMAL of the 
order carnivora, or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the bear family. 

The word badger comes from the 
old English bageard , which was 
changed from the new Latin blada - 
rius, from bladum, corn. The ani¬ 
mal was called bladarius because it 
carried away corn from the fields. 

BAGPIPE, a musical instrument 
much used by the Scotch High¬ 
landers, and by country people in 
other parts of Europe. It is made 
up of a leather bag, which is blown 
full of wind by a tube leading from 
the player’s mouth, and three or 
four pipes, one of which, called the 

35 




BAIZE 


BALLOON 


36 


chanter, has eight holes, and is han- I 
died something like a flute; the 
others are called drones, and make 
the peculiar droning sound of the 
instrument. The player squeezes 
the wind bag under his arm, which 
forces the air into the pipes. The 
bagpipe is a very ancient instrument, 
and was known to the Greeks and 
Romans. Pipers, dressed in High¬ 
land costume, form a part of the 
Highland regiments in the British 
army. 

BAIZE, a coarse woollen cloth, 
usually dyed green. Sometimes it 
has a long nap or furry surface, on 
one side. It is used mostly for cov¬ 
ering tables, screens, doors, etc. 

The word baize is from the 
French baye , which is probably from 
Baiae, where this cloth is said to 
have been first made. 

BALLOON, a bag filled with a 
GAS lighter than air, so that it will 
rise and float in it. The gas used 
in balloons is usually hydrogen, 
which is about fourteen times lighter 
than air, or common coal gas, such 
as is burned for lights, which is two 
or three times lighter than air. The 
bag in which the gas is put is made 
of silk or of muslin, painted with 
india-rubber varnish so as to make 
it air-tight. It is about twice as 
high as it is wide, and shaped like a 
pear, and when filled with gas floats 
with the large end upward and the 
neck hanging down. The neck is 
always left open, because the up¬ 
per air is thinner than that below, 
and the pressure being thus taken 
off the outside of the bag as the 
balloon goes higher, the gas inside 
swells so that it would burst it if it 
were closed. The bag is covered 
all over with a network of small 
rope, the ends of which come down 
below the neck, and are fastened to 
a hoop ; and below the hoop, and 
hung from it by ropes, is the car, 
which is usually a wicker-work bas¬ 
ket, though sometimes a boat is 
used on the chance of the balloon 
coming down in the water. The 


network strengthens the bag and 
makes the weight of the car and its 
load bear equally on all parts of its 
top. A long' rope which hangs down 
through the neck of the bag within 
reach of the balloonist, who sits in 
the car, is fastened to a valve or 
little door on the inside of the top 
of the bag. When the balloonist 
sees that his balloon is going up too 
high, he pulls the rope ; this opens 
the valve, and lets out some of the 
gas, and the balloon begins to come 
down again. When it has come 
down far enough, he lets go of the 
rope and the valve closes so that no 
more gas can escape. Some bags 



Balloon. 


of sand, called the ballast, are al¬ 
ways carried in the car. If the bal¬ 
loon loses too much gas and goes 
down too low, it may easily be light¬ 
ened by emptying the sand out of 
the bags. Every balloon has also 
a long rope with a hook on the end, 
called the grappling iron, which is 
used to catch hold of something on 
the ground when the balloon is com¬ 
ing down, and to anchor it just as a 
ship is anchored to the bottom of 
the sea. 

Balloonists sometimes carry up 
with them a kind of large umbrella 
called a parachute, which can be 
used in case of accident to the bal- 






BALLOON 


37 


BALTIMORE BIRD 


loon. It is made very large and 
strong, and when opened wide is 
borne up by the air, so that the man, 
who sits in a small basket fastened 
to the handle, conies down to the 
earth quite easily and safely. 

Although balloonists have the 
power of making their balloons go 
up or down, they cannot guide them 
in any other way. Many balloons 
have been made to be steered by 
fans, paddles, or sails, but none of 
them have been successful, and al¬ 
though it is about a hundred years 
since balloons were first made, they 
are but little better now than they 
were in the beginning. 

In 1862, two men in England, 
Messrs. Glaisher and Coxwell, 
went up seven miles in a balloon, 
which is higher than anybody had 
ever been before. The air was 
so thin that they could scarcely 
breathe, and it was so cold that Mr. 
Glaisher became numb. Mr. Cox- 
well’s hands were so nearly frozen 
that he could not use them, and he 
had only strength enough left to catch 
the valve rope in his teeth and let 
his head drop on his breast. This 
opened the valve and let out the gas, 
and the balloon soon came down 
where it was warmer, so that they 
recovered their strength. 

Balloons are sometimes used in 
war, both to watch the movements 
of troops on battle fields, and to send 
messages out of besieged cities. 
The French used one at the battle 
of Solferino (1859), and found it 
very useful in spying out the posi¬ 
tions of the different parts of the 
Austrian army. Balloons were also 
used in our civil war in the battles 
around Richmond ; and more than 
sixty were sent out of Paris at 
different times during its siege by 
the Germans (1870-71). Several 
of these fell within the German 
lines, and were seized by the enemy, 
but most of them came down safely, 
though some were carried by the 
wind a great way from the city. 
One fell in the middle of Norway. 


Three were never heard from, and 
are supposed to have been swept 
out into the ocean. Almost all the 
letters sent from Paris during the 
siege were carried out in this way, 
and carrier pigeons were usually 
taken along to send back an¬ 
swers. 

The first balloons ever sent up 
(1783) were filled with heated air, 
because not much was known then 
about hydrogen gas. Toy balloons 
made of tissue paper are much like 
them in principle. They are easily 
made by cutting the paper into 
pieces nearly like quarters of orange 
peel, and pasting the edges together. 
The bottom, which is left open, 
should be pasted over a hoop of 
very light wood or of wire, and a 
wire should be stretched across the 
middle of it to hold a sponge wet 
with turpentine or alcohol. When 
this is lighted the air inside will 
soon get heated enough to cause the 
balloon to rise ; and if the balloon 
go up with the sponge burning it 
will stay up much longer, because 
the air will keep heated longer. 

The word balloon comes from the 
French balloji , a ball; and the bal¬ 
loon was so named because the first 
ones made were round. 

BALTIMORE BIRD, an Ameri¬ 
can bird, often wrongly called Balti¬ 
more oriole ; but there are no ori¬ 
oles in America. It is sometimes 
also called hang-bird, fire hang- 
bird, and golden robin. It is found 
all over the United States, coming 
North in summer and going South 
again in the autumn. The male birds 
are very beautiful, the head, neck, 
wings, and tail being black, and the 
under parts and back bright orange, 
with a tinge of vermilion on the 
breast. The colors of the females 
are duller than those of the males, 
and they are a little smaller. The 
nests of these birds are hung from 
the end of a shady branch by a net¬ 
work of strings, and are very neatly 
and skilfully made. Baltimore birds 
lay five or six light-brown eggs, spot- 





BALUSTER 


38 


BANANA 


ted with dark brown. Their food is 
mostly insects. 

The Baltimore bird belongs to the 
order insessores, or perching BIRDS, 
and to the starling family. 

It is so called because its colors, 
orange and black, are like those of 
the livery of Lord Baltimore. 

BALUSTER, a small column or 
pillar for supporting the rail of a 
staircase, balcony, etc. It is some¬ 
times wrongly called banister and 
ballaster. Balusters are usually 
made of wood, stone, or metal. 
Wooden ones are turned in a 
lathe, stone ones are generally 
cut with chisels, and metal ones are 
cast. A row of balusters, with the 
rail and other parts by which they 
are held together, is called a balus¬ 
trade. Balustrades are used to en¬ 
close stairs, balconies, chancels, 



terraces, and the tops of buildings. 
In the balustrade of a staircase the 
large post at the foot is called the 
newel, or newel post. 

The word baluster comes from the 
Latin balaustium , the flower of the 
wild pomegranate, either because 
balusters were shaped like that flow¬ 
er, or were ornamented with it. 

BAMBOO, a kind of reed growing 
in Asia and in the West Indies. It 
is really a GRASS, but it grows as 
large as some trees, being usually 
forty or fifty feet high, or as tall as a 
pretty high house. Its stems are 
from one to eight inches thick and 
jointed. The Chinese, who use 
bamboos more than any other peo¬ 
ple, plant shoots of the tree in large 
plantations, and after four or five 
years the reeds or canes are ready to 
cut. The bamboo does not blossom 


until it is about thirty years old, and 
dies after it goes to seed. The 
Chinese eat the seeds like rice and 
the tender shoots like asparagus ; 
they also make the shoots into 
pickles and preserves. Almost 
everything is made from bamboo— 
houses, fences, boats, water-wheels, 
furniture, umbrellas, canes, fans, 
hats, paper, water-pipes, and han¬ 
dles for tools and weapons. Some 
cities in the East are entirely built of 
bamboos. 

The word bamboo is from bambti, 
the Malay name of this plant. 

BANANA, the fruit of a plant 
growing in hot climates, which be- 



Banana Plant with Fruit. 


longs to the same family with the 
plantain. The plantain and the 
banana were once thought to be 
different fruits, but they are now 
generally thought to be only differ¬ 
ent kinds of the same fruit. Plan¬ 
tains are coarser than bananas and 
are used mostly for cooking, while 
bananas are usually eaten raw, 
though they are sometimes made 





















BANDANA 


39 


BANK 


into puddings and pies, or fried like 
oysters. 

The banana plant, the shape of 
which is shown in the picture, is 
really a kind of herb, the stem of 
which is made up by the union of 
the leaves as they grow. The leaves 
are sometimes as long as a man, and 
are of a beautiful emerald green. 
The fruit grows in great bunches, 
which often weigh as much as a 
hundred pounds each. When ripe 
the skin is of a bright yellow, but the 
bunches are usually picked when 
green and hung up in a cool place. 
All those sold in the United States 
are picked green and ripen on the 
vessel or after they get here. One 
kind of banana, brought from the 
West Indies, has a red skin when 
ripe. 

The banana is one of the most 
important of foods in hot countries. 
A piece of ground of a size to 
grow wheat enough to feed one man 
will, if planted with bananas, make 
food enough to feed tw T enty-five men. 
A plantation will bear all the year 
round. The young shoots of the 
plant are eaten as greens, and a 
kind of grass cloth of great beauty is 
made from the thready part of the 
leaves. 

The banana is said by some to 
have first grown in the East Indies, 
and to have been brought to the 
West Indies and other parts of 
America by the Spaniards. 

The word banana is Spanish. 

BANDANA, a kind of handker¬ 
chief, dyed usually red, yellow, or 
blue, and having on it round or dia¬ 
mond-shaped white spots. The 
cloth is first dyed of the color 
wanted. A pile of the handkerchiefs 
is then put into a press between 
two copper plates, one of which is 
fastened to the bottom and one to 
the top of the press. These plates 
are pierced with holes just like the 
spots that are to be made on the 
handkerchiefs. A great pressure is 
now put on the pile and a bleach¬ 
ing liquid called chlorine is made 


to flow over the top plate. The 
liquid goes down into the holes, 
passes through the cloth and comes 
out of the holes in the bottom plate, 
taking out all the color and making 
white spots just the size and shape 
of the holes in the plates. The 
pressure is so great that the liquid 
can reach the cloth only where the 
holes are. 

The word bandana is Spanish. 

BANJO, a stringed musical instru¬ 
ment, played with the fingers. The 
neck and head of the banjo are 
something like those of the guitar, 
but the body is round and is covered 
with PARCHMENT like a drum-head, 
instead of with thin wood as in the 
guitar. It usually has five strings. 
The banjo is much played by ne¬ 
groes in the Southern States, and by 
negro minstrels. 

The word banjo is made from 
bandore , the name of a kind of gui¬ 
tar. 

BANK. Every child old enough 
to read and write ought to keep a 
bank account with his father, or some 
other grown-up person, for he will 
thus learn something about taking 
care of money and doing business. 
Money carried about in the pocket or 
kept in a cash box or drawer is apt to 
be stolen or lost, so business men put 
what they do not want to use into a 
bank. When a person leaves money 
in a bank, it is put to his credit, 
that is, it is set down under his name 
on the books of the bank. If he 
wants his money again, or a part of 
it, he draws a check for the sum 
needed, and hands it to the proper 
officer in the bank. The sum named 
in the check is given to him, and the 
bank officer takes it from the sum to 
his credit on the books. 

When a child keeps a bank ac¬ 
count with his father, he gives him 
all the money he wishes to keep, 
and the father keeps an account of 
it just as the bank does for the busi¬ 
ness man. The child also should 
have a little book in which his fa¬ 
ther will set down on one side all 







BANK 


40 


BANK 


the money he gets from him, and on 
the other all which he pays back to 
him. He will thus know all the 
time exactly how much money he 
has in bank. When he wants any 
money, he should draw a check and 
give it, just as the business man does. 

The following is the form of a 
check : 

No. 20. New York, July 1, 1879. 

National Park Bank. 

Pay to John Doe, or bearer, 
One and T 5 ^ Dollars. 

$1.50 John Doe. 

Such a check is called a check 
payable to bearer, because any per¬ 
son who has it can get the money 
for it; but if it were written “to 
John Doe, or order,” no one could 
get the money but John Doe, unless 
it were indorsed by John Doe. To 
indorse a check means to write one’s 
name across the back of it, the word 
being made from the Latin in, on, 
and dorsum, the back. A check 
payable to bearer is mostly used 
when a person draws money from 
a bank, and one payable to order 
when a person pays out a check to 
some other person whom he owes, 
thus using it for money. 

Checks payable to order are 
usually drawn as follows : 

No. 16. New York, Oct. 7, 1879. 

National Park Bank. 

Pay to the order of Richard Roe, 
Three and Dollars. 

$3.19 John Doe. 

Such a check is an order on the 
bank to pay the money to Richard 
Roe, who would have to indorse it 
before he could make use of it. A 
child who keeps a bank account with 
his parent would generally use only a 
check payable to bearer, but he 
ought to know about both kinds. 
When he gives a check to his parent 
he will at the same time give him 
his book, and the sum named in the 
check will be taken from the ac¬ 
count of money paid in, and set down 
under that paid out. 


The use of checks saves business 
men much trouble ; indeed, business 
could hardly be done without them. 
When a merchant wishes to send 
money to a distance, he does not 
send gold or bills, but a check in 
which the bank where he keeps his 
money is ordered to pay the sum 
named in it to the person to whose 
order it is made. That person writes 
his name across the back of it, and 
puts it into his own bank, where it is 
put to his credit ; and this bank gets 
the money from the bank named in 
the check. 

To understand about banks we 
must first look a little into their his¬ 
tory. The first bankers in England 
were Italian Jews from Lombardy. 
Lombard Street, the principal bank¬ 
ing street in London, was named 
after them. They were called bank¬ 
ers because they first had benches 
or bancos (Italian banco, bench) in the 
market place, where they exchanged 
small pieces of money for large. 
After a time they began to take care 
of money for people who had no safe 
place to keep it in, and to lend 
money to those who needed it. 
When a banker lent money he made 
the borrower leave with him goods, 
jewels, title deeds to land, and other 
valuable things, which were worth 
more than the money lent, so that 
if the borrower failed to pay the 
money, the banker could get it back 
by selling the things left with him. 
If the borrower paid the money at 
the time named, and gave the bank¬ 
er a small sum besides to pay him 
for the use of it, he got back his 
property. The property thus held 
for borrowed money was called 
security (Latin securitas, safety), 
because it made it safe, and the sum 
paid for the use of money, interest 
(Latin interest , it is of benefit), be¬ 
cause the banker got that much ben¬ 
efit for the loan of his money. 

There are now three kinds of 
banks—banks of deposit, banks of 
discount, and banks of circulation. 
A Bank of Deposit is one which re- 





BANK 


4i 


BANK 


ceives and takes care of money, and 
pays it out for checks. 

A Bank of Discount is one which 
lends money on security, just as the 
old bankers used to do. But banks 
do not now take goods, jewels, and 
such things as security ; that is done 
only by pawnbrokers. When a per¬ 
son wishes to borrow money from a 
bank, he usually makes his note for 
the sum wanted. A note is a writ¬ 
ten promise to pay a sum of money 
at a time and place named in it. 

The following is a common form : 

$125.50. 

New York, August 1, 1879. 

Sixty days after date, for value re¬ 
ceived, I promise to pay to the order 
of Richard Roe, One Hundred and 
Twenty-five and T 5 ^ dollars, at the 
National Park Bank. 

John Doe. 

The person who makes or signs 
the note is called the maker, and the 
one to whose order it is made the 
payee. The person who owns a note 
is called the holder. A note written 
like the above, or if written ‘ ‘ to 
Richard Roe, or order, ” or “ to Rich¬ 
ard Roe, or bearer,” is negotiable, 
that is, it may be used as money. If 
written to “order,” as in the first 
two cases, Richard Roe would have 
to indorse it by writing his name 
across the back ; but if to “ bearer,” 
it may be paid out without indorsing. 
There are two kinds of indorse¬ 
ments. If the payee merely writes 
his name across the back, it is called 
a blank indorsement, and it may then 
be paid out like a note to bearer. 
But the payee may direct to whom 
the note shall be paid, and he then 
writes on the back : “ Pay to the 

order of-,” writing in the name 

of the person to whom he wishes it 
paid, and signs his name below it. 
This is called a special indorsement; 
the person to whom it is indorsed 
is called the indorsee and the person 
indorsing the indorser. The indorsee 
can indorse to a second indorsee, and 
so on to any number. In indorsing 


a note, the indorser promises to pay 
the note when the time named in it 
comes, if the maker fails to do so. 
The bank which lends money for 
the note thus has a double security 
for its payment. 

Banks always charge a little inter¬ 
est for money loaned. This interest 
is taken out when the money is lent, 
and only the remainder is paid to the 
borrower. For instance, if the note 
is for $100, and the time named in 
it for the repayment of the money is 
one year, the bank will take out $6, 
if the rate of interest is 6 per cent 
(Latin per , by, and centum , hun¬ 
dred, meaning 6 dollars on each 100 
dollars), and will pay the borrower 
only $94 ; and at the end of the year 
the borrower will have to pay the 
$100 in full to the bank, thus return¬ 
ing the money which he received and 
the interest added. Interest is thus 
the sum which the bank gets for the 
use of its money. Interest is usually 

6 per cent., but in some States it is 

7 per cent., and in a few States still 
more. 

All banks of deposit are now banks 
of discount also. If a banker acted 
merely as a keeper of people’s money 
he would get no profit from it; he 
therefore loans it out on interest, and 
thus gets paid for his trouble. The 
money lent out by banks does a great 
deal of good. If it were hoarded up 
in vaults and safes it would be of no 
use to anybody, but when put into 
public use it goes all through the 
country and makes business prosper¬ 
ous. Banks lend not only the money 
of others, but also their own money. 
Their own money is called their 
capital. A bank without capital 
would not have the confidence of the 
people, and would get no deposits, 
because if it lost any of the money 
which it loaned out it would have no 
means of repaying it. 

A Bank of Circulation or issue is 
one which pays out its own notes for 
money. A bank note is not money ; 
it is only a promise to pay money; 
but when people have full faith that 




BANK NOTE 


42 


BANK NOTE 


the promise will be kept, it passes just 
the same as money. The promise is 
usually to pay the amount of the note 
to the bearer of it, on demand, in 
gold coin. Banks of deposit and 
discount are usually also banks of 
circulation ; but there are some 
which do not pay out their own 
notes. 

A Savings Bank is a bank of de¬ 
posit which receives and takes care 
of money, and gives interest for the 
use of it. Such banks are used 
chiefly by poor people, who can thus 
lay up small sums of money in a safe 
place, where it will all the time be 
gaining interest. The bank lends 
this money to other people on good 
security, for a larger interest than 
that which it pays, and thus makes 
money for itself. Such banks are 
not allowed to lend money simply on 
indorsed notes, like banks of dis¬ 
count, but are obliged by law to have 
good security, such as bonds, land, 
etc., which will sell for more than the 
money loaned. 

BANK NOTE. In no other coun¬ 
try in the world are bank notes made 
with so much skill as in the United 



Bank Note Counter. 


States. Every bank note in this 
country is a fine engraving, printed 
from a steel plate. The making of 
the plate is a long and difficult work, 
which takes the labor of many per¬ 
sons. Each one is made up of sever¬ 
al parts. Take, for instance, a five- 
dollar United States note : in the 
middle is a picture, with the words 
“ United States” and “ Five 
Dollars” on each side of it; on the 
left is a small portrait, called a vign¬ 
ette ; and in each of the two upper 


corners is a black space covered 
with a network of fine white lines, 
the one on the left with a V on it, 
and the one on the right with a fig¬ 
ure 5 on it. These network spaces, 
which are called ” counters,” are 
somewhat like the one shown in the 
picture. 

These different parts of the note 
are made separately and on separate 
plates. In making a vignette, a 
large drawing is first made with the 
greatest care on paper. A daguerre¬ 
otype is then taken of this, of ex¬ 
actly the size of the engraving 
wanted. The engraver marks with 
a steel point on the daguerreotype 
plate all the outlines of the picture. 
A print is taken from this plate, 
just as from a steel plate (see En¬ 
graving), and while the ink is still 
damp the paper is laid face down¬ 
ward on a steel plate, which has 
been softened by heating it red hot 
and then letting it cool slowly, and 
pressed in a press. An exact copy 
of the outline is thus printed on the 
plate, and the engraver then finishes 
the vignette with the burin, like any 
other steel engraving, excepting that 
nothing but line engraving is put on 
a bank note plate. 

This plate is never used to print 
from, but only for making other 
plates. It is first hardened, by heat¬ 
ing it and cooling it quickly. A lit¬ 
tle roller of softened steel, just as 
wide as the engraving, is then rolled 
over the plate by a very powerful 
machine until its soft surface has 
been forced into all the lines cut into 
the plate. This makes a relief of 
the engraving — that is, the lines 
which in the plate are all sunk below 
its surface appear on the roller in 
relief, or above the surface. The 
roller is then hardened and may be 
used to roll over other plates, in 
each of which the lines will thus be 
sunk exactly like those in the first 
or engraved one. This is called the 
transferring process, because the 
original engraving is transferred or 
changed to other plates. 





BANK NOTE 


43 


BARK 


The picture in the middle is also 
engraved and transferred to a soft¬ 
ened roller like the vignette ; but the 
counters are made in a different 
way, by a machine named a lathe. 
All the network designs on the back 
of the note are also made by the 
lathe. They are so perfect that they 
cannot be made by hand, and it is 
almost impossible for counterfeiters 
to get one of these machines, which 
cost about $5000 apiece. After the 
counter has been engraved by the 
machine on softened steel, the figure 
is engraved by hand in the middle, 
and it is then hardened and trans¬ 
ferred to a cylinder just like the 
others. 

The plate from which the bills are 
to be printed is of -softened steel, 
and is large enough to print four 
bills at once ; so four engravings of 
the note are made on it. If all these 
had to be engraved by hand it would 
take a long time, and all would differ 
a little from each other ; but when 
made by the transferring process 
they are done quickly and all are ex¬ 
actly alike. For instance, in making 
the plate of the five-dollar bill the 
little steel roller having the raised 
picture on it is rolled backward and 
forward over the middle of the four 
plates until the picture is pressed 
into each one. The vignette is next 
rolled on in the same way in its 
proper place in each of the plates, 
and the other parts one after the 
other. After all the parts have been 
rolled on, the plate is finished by 
the hand engraver, who engraves on 
it all the lettering excepting the fine 
lettering around the border, which 
is made by a machine and transferred 
to the plate like the pictures. 

Bank notes are printed like any 
other steel engraving. All the black 
part is printed first. After the note 
is dry the green back is printed on 
it, and when that is dry the red 
stamps are put on and the note is 
signed. To make sure that none of 
the money be stolen, one part of the 
note is usually engraved and printed 


at one place, and another part at 
another place, and then the note is 
sent to Washington to be finished 
and signed. 

BARBERRY, a shrub which grows 
wild in the northern parts of Europe 
and Asia, and in many parts of 
the United States. Its berries, 
which are about the shape and size 
of grains of wheat, and bright red, 
are so sour that birds will not eat 
them ; but they make a pleasant drink, 
and good preserves and jelly. A fine 
yellow dye for leather is made from 
its bark and roots, and its bark is 
also used for tanning. 

The word barberry comes from 
berbertSy the Spanish name of the 
plant, which is from the Arabic 
berberys. 

BARIUM, a metal, and one of the 
elements. It is never found as a 
metal, but always mixed with other 
things, such as oxygen and sul¬ 
phur. The chemist sometimes 
makes a little of the metal, but not 
enough for much use. The com¬ 
pounds of barium with other things 
are used in medicine and the arts. 
Baryta or barytes (barium oxide), 
made up of barium and oxygen, is 
a poisonous earth, used by chemists ; 
but what is commonly called baryta 
or barytes is the sulphate of baryta 
(barium sulphate), which has sulphur 
in it. This is a heavy white min¬ 
eral, called also heavy spar, which, 
when ground fine, is much used to 
mix with white lead. It is also put 
into paper pulp to make paper weigh 
more, and to give it a gloss. White 
satin paper is made with it. 

The word barium comes from the 
Greek barus , heavy, and the metal 
gets its name from its great weight. 

BARK, the rind or skin of plants. 
The bark of trees is usually made 
up of two parts, an outer and an 
inner bark. The outer bark is only 
a covering to protect the inner one, 
and has no life in it. In many kinds 
of trees it is coarse and rough, and 
it often breaks off in pieces as the 
tree grows. The whole outer bark 




BARLEY 


44 


BAROMETER 


of the white birch tree may be easily 
peeled off. The inner bark, which 
lies between the outer rind and the 
wood, is always fresh and full of sap 
when the tree is alive, and is the 
cause of its growth. The sap, which 
goes up through the wood of the tree 
from the roots to all the branches 
and leaves, comes down again 
through the inner bark and makes 
new wood and new bark grow every 
year. If the sap did not thus go 
down through the bark, the tree 
would die. You can now see why a 
tree is killed when it is girdled by 
cutting a strip of the bark off all 
around it. The bark of some trees 
is very thin, and of others very thick, 
such as that of the great trees in 
California, which is sometimes two 
feet thick. Bark has many uses : 
many kinds are used in dyeing and 
in tanning leather, and corks are cut 
from a kind of oak bark ; the Indians 
make canoes and huts out of it, the 
South Sea Islanders cloth, and many 
peoples paper, baskets, ropes, and 
twine. Cinnamon is the bark of a 
tree that grows in Ceylon, and 
quinine is made from Peruvian 
bark. 

The word bark is from the Dan¬ 
ish or Swedish, both of which lan¬ 
guages have the same word. 

BARLEY, a kind of grain. It is 
not known in what country barley 
first grew, but it has been raised by 
almost all nations from the most 
ancient times. It grows in climates 
too cold for other grains, and is also 
raised in warm climates. Barley is 
good food for cattle, and in the 
northern parts of Europe it is ground 
and made into a coarse kind of 
bread, but it is mostly used in mak¬ 
ing beer. In Scotland it is made 
into barley broth. The grains of 
barley, called barley corns, are yel¬ 
lowish-brown on the outside and 
white on the inside. When stripped 
of the outer husk and rounded in a 
mill, they look like little pearl-white 
shot, and are called pearl barley. 
Pearl barley cooked and mixed with 


milk is among the best foods for 
babies. 



Head of Barley. 


The word barley is from the old 
English bcerlie , which is from the 
Anglo-Saxon bere. 

BAROMETER, an instrument to 
measure the weight of the AIR. 
If you put one end of a tube into 
a bowl of water, and the other end 
into your mouth, you can draw the 
water up through the tube into your 
mouth by sucking. You may think 
that you suck the water up, but you 
do not; you only suck the air out 
of the tube, and the weight of the 
outer AIR, pressing down on the 
water in the bowl, forces it up into 
the tube. As soon as you let the 
air into the tube again the water runs 
back into the bowl. If you had a 
tube long enough, and you could 
suck all the air out of it, the water 
would rise up in the tube nearly 
thirty-four feet. It would stop at 
this height because the weight of a 
column of that height just balances 
the weight of the air which presses 
down on the surface of the bowl. 
If the tube is more than thirty-four 
feet long there will be above the 
water a space in which there will not 
be anything, not even air. This is 




BAROMETER 


45 


BAROMETER 


B 


3 / 

30 

29 

28 

J 27 


called a vacuum. If you should put 
the tube into some fluid lighter than 
water, the fluid would rise higher in 
the tube than thirty-four feet, be¬ 
cause it would take 
more of it to balance 
the weight of the air ; 
and if the fluid were 
heavier than water it 
would not rise so high, 
because it would take 
less of it to balance the 
weight of the air. 

More than two hun¬ 
dred years ago, an 
Italian named Torri¬ 
celli, who knew that 
water would rise up in 
a tube about thirty- 
four feet when the air 
was drawn out, but did 
not know why, tried to 
find out the reason of 
it. He filled a glass 
tube thirty-three inches 
long, and open at only 
one end, with mer¬ 
cury, and then put¬ 
ting his finger over it 
so as to keep the mer¬ 
cury in, he turned it bottom upward 
into a bowl of mercury, and then 
took away his finger. As mercury 
is one of the heaviest things in the 
world, it would seem as if it ought 
to have all run out of the tube into 
the bowl ; but it only fell a little 
way, and remained there standing in 
the tube. As mercury is about four¬ 
teen times heavier than water, Torri¬ 
celli saw that the height of the mer¬ 
cury in the tube was about one four¬ 
teenth part of that of the thirty-four 
foot column of water, and he at once 
concluded that both the mercury and 
the water were held up by the pres¬ 
sure of the air on the surface of the 
bowl. He afterward found out that 
the mercury did not always stand at 
the same height, but that it would 
rise and fall with the changes in the 
weather. 

This led to the making of the 
barometer, which is the same in 



Straight-Tube 

Barometer. 


principle as the tube used by Torri¬ 
celli. In the picture, A B is the 
tube, and C the dish of mercury. 
The space above the mercury is 
called the Torricellian vacuum (Lat¬ 
in for empty space), because Torri¬ 
celli first found it out. A scale of 
figures is put on the side of the tube, 
so that as the mercury rises or falls 
the pressure of the air can easily be 
seen. Such a barometer is called a 
straight-tube barometer, but the one 
most used has a bent tube, like that 
in the second picture. In this the 
tube, A B C, is bent like a siphon ; 
but it works the same as the other, 
because the air presses down on the 
mercury through the open end of 
the shorter tube with just as much 
force as it does on the surface of the 
bowl. This is called a siphon ba¬ 
rometer. A little weight, D, rests 
on the top of the mercury in the open 
end, and rises and falls with it. It 
is fastened to a thread which passes 
out of the tube and around a wheel 
which moves a pointer, F, like a 
clock hand. This pointer turns 
round a dial, G, and 
points to figures 
showing the height 
of the mercury, and 
also to words such 
as “Fair,” “Rain,” 

“ Changeable,” etc. 

In pleasant weather, 
when the air is dry 
and free from damp¬ 
ness, it is heavier 
than in wet weather, 
and the mercury rises 
in the longer tube, 
causing the little 
weight to fall and 
move the pointer 
round till it points to 
the word “ Fair,” or 
some place near it. 

When the air is moist 
it is lighter than when 
it is dry, and the pressure being 
partly taken off from the weight, it 
rises and the mercury in the longer 
tube falls. This moves the pointer 


A 



Siphon Baro¬ 
meter. 















BARREL 


46 


BASE 


round the other way, and it then 
points to “ Stormy” or “ Rain.” 

The barometer is often used to tell 
the height of mountains and other 
high places. As the air gets thinner 
the higher we go, the pressure be¬ 
comes less and less on the mercury 
in the open end of the tube and 
causes that in the long tube to fall. 
As we know about how much the 
mercury will fall in going up a hun¬ 
dred feet, we can tell very nearly the 
height of a mountain by noticing the 
height of the barometer at the bot¬ 
tom and then at the top. 

The word barometer is made up 
of the Greek words baros , weight, 
and metron , measure. 

BARREL. The sides of a barrel 
are made up of narrow pieces, called 
staves, which are made wider in the 
middle than at the ends, but are bent 
so that their edges fit tightly to¬ 
gether. This forms what is called 
the bulge of the barrel—that is, the 
swell of the middle—and adds greatly 
to its strength. A barrel made with 
staves of the same width from end to 
end would be straight instead of 
bulging, and would be much more 
easily broken in from the outside, but 
the bulge acts like an arch and re¬ 
sists pressure. 

The staves are held together by 
hoops, which are sometimes of wood 
and sometimes of iron. Grooves are 
cut around the inside of the staves, 
near each end, to receive the heads, 
which are round flat pieces of wood, 
shaved thin at the edges so as to fit 
into these grooves. Heads are usu¬ 
ally made of two or more pieces, 
fastened together at the edges by 
wooden pins called DOWELS. When 
they are put into place the last hoops 
are put on and driven down tight, 
which brings the ends of the staves 
closely together and causes the 
grooves to hold the heads firmly. 
The ends of the staves which reach 
beyond the heads are called the 
chines. 

Barrels made for liquids usually 
have a large round hole, called a 


bung, in the middle of the side, by 
which they may be filled and the con¬ 
tents may be drawn off. Barrels for 
dry articles are always unheaded by 
removing the hoops at one end, when 
the head readily comes out. The 
barrel is much more convenient to 
handle than the square box. It can 
be quickly rolled from place to place, 
and is swung in and out of vessels by 
means of hooks caught under the 
chines. Barrels were once always 
made by hand, but great numbers 
are now made by machinery. The 
staves are planed, bent, and grooved 
in a machine, and come out all ready 
to be made up into barrels. Differ¬ 
ent sizes of barrels are called 
kegs, casks, pipes, hogsheads, and 
butts. 

The word barrel is from the 
French baril. 

BASALT, a very tough, heavy 
igneous ROCK, usually dirty brown, 
greenish-black, or black. It is often 
found in regular jointed columns, 
as in Fingal’s Cave, Scotland, the 
Giant’s Causeway, Ireland, and on 
the shore of Lake Superior. Basalt 
is much used, on account of its hard¬ 
ness, for macadamizing roads and 
making pavements. It is also some¬ 
times melted and cast into blocks for 
building and mouldings. 

The word basalt is from the Latin 
basaltes. 

BASE, the name of a class of sub¬ 
stances which, when mixed with 
acids, unite with them and form 
compounds (see Element) called 
SALTS. Bases, like acids, are made 
up usually of the elements hydro¬ 
gen, oxygen, and some one other 
element; but, while in acids this 
third element is something which is 
not a metal, such as nitrogen, sul¬ 
phur, and carbon, in bases the 
element which unites with hydrogen 
and oxygen is usually a metal, such as 
POTASSIUM, SODIUM, and COPPER. 
For instance, nitric acid is formed by 
the union of hydrogen and oxygen 
with nitrogen, which is not a metal ; 
and the base caustic potash is formed 




BASKET 


47 


BASKET 


by the union of hydrogen and oxygen 
with potassium, which is a metal. 
Thus we have two classes of sub¬ 
stances, one called acids and the 
other bases, which are wholly dif¬ 
ferent from each other. If now we 
mix one of these acids with a base, 
the two will unite and form a sub¬ 
stance entirely different from either. 
Thus, nitric acid and the base caus¬ 
tic potash will unite when brought 
together, and form nitre or salt¬ 
petre (potassium nitrate), which is 
not like either nitric acid or potash. 
The compounds made by the union 
of acids and bases are called salts, 
because they have a general likeness 
to common salt, which was one of 
the first salts known. A certain 
class of bases are called alkalies. 

The name base, which comes from 
the Latin basis , foundation, is given to 
this class of substances because they 
are the foundation of compounds. 

BASKET. The weaving of wicker 
work is one of the oldest arts known 
to man. Baskets made before the 
time of Christ have been found in 
Egyptian tombs. The ancient Assyr¬ 
ians were skilful in wicker work, and 
even made boats of it for use on the 
river Tigris ; and the same kind of 
boats are still used on that river. 
These boats, which the Arabs call 
gooff ah, are merely large, round, 
flat - bottomed baskets, made of 
strong wicker work. They are made 
water-tight by a coat of asphalt, 
smeared about an inch thick all over 
the inside and outside. This, which 
is mixed with some other things, 
soon becomes as hard as stone. 
Some gooffahs are large enough to 
hold as many as twenty persons at 
once, and camels, horses, cattle, and 
sheep are often carried across the 
river in them. The Romans found 
the same kind of boats in use among 
the Britons. The Britons also built 
huts of wicker work, and made great 
cages out of it in which they shut up 
and burned alive their prisoners of 
war. Indeed, so skilful were they 
in this kind of work that baskets 


made by them were much sought af¬ 
ter and brought high prices in Rome. 

Many kinds of twigs and splints 
are now woven into baskets, but the 
shoots of the willow, or osier, are 
most generally used. These, which 
are cut yearly, are first soaked in 
water, and then peeled by a tool 
made for the purpose. They are 
sometimes used whole and round, 
but for fine work they are split into 
flat strips, like the straw used in 
plaiting straw hats and bonnets. 
Ash, elm, and birch shoots and 
splints are also u'sed in basket mak¬ 
ing. Splints are thin flat strips got 
by beating logs of wood with a maul 
or mallet until the layers of wood 
separate from each other, when they 
are peeled off and cut into the proper 
widths. There are now several 
machines for making splints, which 
cut the wood from the log into the 
right thickness. Strong baskets are 
woven from rattan canes, used either 
whole or split, and much furniture 
also is now made from them. 
Basket - making is very simple. 
Strong pieces are first laid across 
each other and woven together to 
make the bottom ; the ends of thin¬ 
ner pieces are then fixed in these and 
turned up to form the ribs, and the 
sides are made by knitting or weav¬ 
ing smaller rods in with these until 
the basket is high enough, when the 
ribs are turned down and woven in 
so as to hold the whole tightly to¬ 
gether. This is the way to make 
the rudest kind of basket. Fine 
baskets are woven in many different 
patterns and colors, the splints being 
colored before using. The most 
elegant baskets are made in France, 
China, and Japan. In South Amer¬ 
ica the Indians make baskets of 
rushes so closely woven that they 
will hold water; and the North 
American Indians also make very 
pretty ornamented baskets. 

Our word basket comes from the 
Welsh word basged, which is from 
basg, a netting or plaiting, as of twigs 
or osiers. 





BASS 


48 


BAT 


BASS. Fish of this name are 
found in almost all parts of the world, 
some in fresh and some in salt water. 
The principal fresh-water kinds in 
the United States are the black bass 
and the rock bass. 

The Black Bass is found in most 
of the Western lakes and streams, 
and many have been put into lakes 
in New York and New England. It 
is blue-black above with bronze shad¬ 
ings, and lighter below. This fish 
sometimes weighs seven or eight 
pounds. It bites well, and fishing 
for it is good sport. The best bait 
is the minnow or other small live fish. 

The Rock Bass is broad like a 
roach, and is coppery yellow in color, 
with dark bands and marks. It sel¬ 
dom weighs more than a pound, but 
makes good fishing, and is much 
liked for the table. It was once 
common only in the streams of the 
valley of the St. Lawrence, but many 
are now caught in the Hudson river. 
Other fresh-water bass, such as the 
white bass and the grass bass, are 
caught in the great lakes. 

The Sea Bass, sometimes called 
the black bass, is the most important 
of the salt-water bass of the United 
States. It never goes into fresh wa¬ 
ter. Its color is blue-black above, 
lighter below, and the scales are all 
edged with black so that it looks as 
if it were covered with a network. 
Sea bass are caught almost all along 
the northern Atlantic coast. The 
bait used is chiefly salted clams. 

The Striped Bass, generally called 
rock fish south of New Jersey, is the 
largest of all the basses, some of them 
weighing sixty or seventy pounds, or 
as much as a boy ten years old. It 
is bluish-brown above and silvery- 
white below, and is marked length¬ 
wise with brown stripes. It lives in 
the deep salt-water bays in the win¬ 
ter, and goes up rivers in the spring. 
Striped bass are caught generally 
with rod and line, with minnow, 
shiner, crab, shrimp, or shad-roe 
bait. They are sometimes caught 
also in nets. 


Bass belong to the perch family of 
fishes, and the name bass is made 
from the Anglo-Saxon word beers , 
which means a perch. 

BASSOON, a bass wind musical 
instrument, used in orchestras 
and military bands. It is made of 
a long tube of wood, usually maple 
wood or plane tree, and is in two 
parts, bound together side by side 
for sake of convenience. It is played 
by blowing through a bent brass 
mouth-piece, which is fitted with a 
reed or tongue like that in a clarinet. 
It has generally eight holes and ten 
keys, and the tube is bent together 
so that the fingers can easily reach 
them. Military bands have several 
sizes of bassoons. 

The bassoon was first made by the 
Italians, who named it fagotto (bun¬ 
dle), because it is made of pieces 
put together. The French call it 
bassoji de hautboy. Basson is from 
the Italian. bassone, which comes from 
basso , bass, and the name is given to 
the bassoon because it is a bass in¬ 
strument. 

BAT, an animal with wings made 
of a thin membrane or skin, which 
is stretched from the fingers of the 
hands and along the sides back to the 
legs and the tail. The four fingers 
are very long and slender and joined 
together by the membrane, but the 
thumb is short and armed with a 
claw. The feet have five short toes, 
all with hooked nails. Bats hang 
themselves up by these, with the 
head downward, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture, when they sleep or are at rest, 
usually in some dark place. When 
they want to fly they let go and their 
wings at once spread out. They fly 
easily, and are very active in the air, 
but are awkward and clumsy on the 
ground. When a bat walks it 
reaches forward, catches hold of 
something with one thumb, and 
draws its body up to it; it then 
does the same with the other thumb, 
so that it makes a kind of zig-zag 
movement. 

In old times the bat used to be 





BAT 


49 


BATH 


called a “ flittermouse,” and it was 
well named, for the common kind 
looks much like a mouse with wings. 
The color of both is nearly the same. 
The bat has small eyes, but the ears 
are large and its hearing is very 
sharp. The mouth too is large, so 
that it can easily catch insects when 
it is flying. 

Bats are found in almost all parts 
of the world excepting the coldest, 
but chiefly in hot countries. Those 



Bat Hanging by its Toes. 


in North America live mostly on 
insects, but the food of some foreign 
bats is principally fruits. The vam¬ 
pire bat of South America, when 
very hungry, will suck the blood of 
poultry and of animals. 

The bat is a mammal of the order 
cheiroptera , or hand-winged ani¬ 
mals. 

The word bat is changed from the 
old English back. The Scotch call 
the bat bakie-bird. 


BATH. Bathing was a part of the 
religion of many ancient nations, 
particularly the Egyptians, Hebrews, 
and Greeks ; and the laws of Mo¬ 
hammed require that the face, hands, 
and feet shall be washed five times 
a day. In the desert, where water 
is very scarce, Mohammedans do 
this with sand. 

The public baths of the Romans 
in the times of the emperors were 
the most splendid that have ever 
been built. Those built by the Em¬ 
peror Diocletian were large enough 
for eighteen thousand persons to 
bathe at once, and those of the Em¬ 
peror Caracalla were more than a 
quarter of a mile square. They had 
in them hot and cold water baths, 
hot air and vapor baths, swimming 
baths, waiting rooms, rooms for un¬ 
dressing, and courts for games and 
manly exercises, all adorned with 
mosaics, marbles, paintings, and 
statues. 

The Turkish Bath is a copy of the 
ancient Arabian hot air bath, which 
was largely used also by the Rom¬ 
ans. The bather goes first into a 
room where the air is heated quite 
hot ; when he begins to perspire he 
passes into a still hotter chamber, 
where the air is almost hot enough to 
cook an egg, and as soon as he per¬ 
spires freely he goes into a wash 
room, where his body is scrubbed 
with soap and water, and cooled with 
a shower bath. He then plunges 
into a swimming bath in which the 
water is about as cool as the air, 
and after being dried passes to still 
another room, where he lies on a 
lounge, rolled up in a blanket, until 
his body is thoroughly dry and 
brought back to its common heat. 

The Russian Bath is very much 
like the Turkish, excepting that hot 
steam is used instead of hot air. 
The Turkish bath can be borne at a 
much greater heat than the Russian. 
If taken with care these baths are 
healthful, but if either be taken too 
hot the blood will become so heated 
as to make it dangerous. 




































BATH 


50 


BEADS 


The Cold Bath always gives the 
bather a sudden chill when he 
plunges in, but this is followed by a 
feeling of warmth and a glow all over 
his body. This is called the reaction. 
If he leave the water at this time and 
rub himself dry, he will feel light and 
strong, but if he stay in long after 
the reaction, he will again become 
chilled and his body will feel weak. 
Thus, when properly taken, the cold 
bath is healthful, but if abused it 
is unhealthful. None but strong, 
healthy persons should bathe in cold 
water, and it should not be used when 
the body is tired or overheated by 
exercise. 

The Warm Bath is very pleasant, 
and gives no shock to the bather. It 
causes a gentle glow throughout the 
body, quiets the nerves, and causes 
the blood to flow quicker ; but it does 
not strengthen like the cold bath, and 
if used too often it makes the bather 
feel changes of heat very quickly. 
Still, the best and pleasantest bath 
for a healthy person is one in 
which the water is tepid or luke¬ 
warm. 

The Hot Bath brings the blood 
quickly to the surface, the skin be¬ 
comes red and swollen, the pulse full, 
and there is a feeling of weight about 
the head. This causes fatigue and 
weakens the body. It should not 
be taken regularly by healthy per¬ 
sons, but if used the bather should 
begin with a lukewarm bath and 
then let in the hot water little by 
little. He should leave the bath be¬ 
fore he feels any loss of strength, take 
a cold shower bath, and then rub 
himself dry with a coarse towel. 

Sea Bathing in the proper season is 
healthful, as the salt is good for the 
skin and strengthens the body. 
But care should be taken not to re¬ 
main in the water too long, as the re¬ 
action will pass off and the body be¬ 
come chilled. The body should be 
rubbed dry and the clothing put on 
at once on coming out of the water. 
No bath should be taken until two 
or three hours after eating. 


The word bath is from the 
Anglo-Saxon baeth. 

BAYONET, a steel pike or sword 
which can be fastened on the end 
of a gun, and used by foot soldiers. 
Before bayonets were made, men 
armed with long pikes or spears 
were mixed in with musketeers to 
help them to keep off cavalry, as 
horses cannot be forced to run on a 
sharp-pointed thing ; but when bay¬ 
onets were added to muskets, pike- 
men were no longer needed. Com¬ 
mon bayonets are made straight and 
three-cornered, but some are like a 
sword, and others are shaped like a 
trowel, and can be used both to fight 
with and to dig the ground up to 



Bayonets. 

a , Sword Bayonet; b, Common Bayo¬ 
net; c y Trowel Bayonet. 

make banks of earth called entrench¬ 
ments, behind which soldiers can lie 
in safety. These three kinds of bay¬ 
onets are shown in the picture, a 
being the sword bayonet, b the com¬ 
mon bayonet, and c the trowel bay¬ 
onet. 

The bayonet is named from Bay¬ 
onne, in France, where bayonets are 
said to have been first made about 
1640. 

BEADS. The principal places for 
making glass beads are Murano, 
near Venice, and Birmingham, Eng¬ 
land ; but many are also brought 
from China. They are made from 
glass tubes of different sizes, which 
are cut up into little pieces and then 













BEAN 


5i 


BEAR 


rounded on the edges by melting 
with a blowpipe, or by mixing them 
with sand and wood ashes and then 
shaking them up in a red hot iron 
pan until they are rounded. The 
sand and ashes keep the beads from 
melting together into one mass. The 
large beads used for dolls’ eyes are 
made in Birmingham. Beads are 
used for ornamenting slippers, 
purses, and fancy work, and great 
quantities are sent to Africa, India, 
and the islands of the Pacific, where 
they are worn as ornaments. In 
China every mandarin wears a string 
of beads when in full dress. The 
long beads called ‘ * bugles’ ’ are much 
used by ladies for trimming dresses. 

Beads are also made out of met¬ 
als, precious stones, coral, amber, 
wood, and many other things. 

The word bead comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon bead or bede , a prayer ; 
in former times beads were used to 
number prayers, as they still are 
used by some in strings called rosa¬ 
ries. 

BEAN, the seed of several kinds 
of plants which bear pods. The 
common bean is cultivated both in 
gardens and in fields. There are 
many kinds, with seeds of different 
shapes, sizes, and colors, some of 
which grow on running vines and 
some on bushy shrubs. Beans make 
good food for men and animals. 
Both the seeds and the green pods 
are cooked for the table. In Ger¬ 
many the pods are cut up while green 
and salted for winter use. The 
French kidney bean, or haricot, and 
the Lima bean are the seeds of 
plants entirely different from the 
common bean. 

The word bean is Anglo-Saxon. 

BEAR, a large animal found in 
Europe, Asia, and America, but not 
in Africa and Australia. Bears, 
though flesh-eaters, eat also vegeta¬ 
bles, honey, and other things. They 
live in both warm and cold climates, 
but those in warm countries are not 
so strong and savage as those in the 
polar regions. 


There are many kinds of bears. 
The Arctic or White Polar Bear lives 
in the most northerly parts of Asia 
and America, and always near the 
sea, because its food is principally 
seals, fishes, and sea birds. It is 
very large, often weighing fifteen 
hundred pounds, or more than a 
large horse, and is strong and fierce. 
In the winter it goes into its den, 
which is sometimes only a deep hole 
dug in the snow, and spends most 
of the time there until spring. It is 
a very cunning animal, and has many 
tricks for getting food. 

A polar bear once saw a seal 
lying on the ice near a hole. He 
knew that if he went towards the 
seal on the ice it would go into 
the hole and escape him; so he 



Head of Polar Bear. 


crept along until he got as near as 
he could without being seen, then 
dropped into the water and swam 
under the ice until he reached the 
hole into which the poor seal expect¬ 
ed to retreat, and coming up through 
it seized him. 

The captain of a whaling vessel 
wanted the skin of a white bear 
whole and perfect, and thought he 
would try to kill one without shoot¬ 
ing it; so he laid a cord with a run¬ 
ning noose on the snow, and put a 
bait in it. A bear, going about on 
the ice, found the bait and got 
caught in the noose by one paw, but 
succeeded in getting it off with his 
other paw and carried away the bait. 
The snare was laid again. The 
bear came a second time, but remem- 




BEAR 


BEAVER 


$2 


bering what had happened, he pushed 
the cord aside and again took the 
bait. The snare was laid a third 
time, the cord being hidden with 
snow, but this succeeded no better 
than the others. For a last trial the 
bait was put into a hole so deep that 
the bear could not get it without put¬ 
ting in his head, and a noose, hidden 
under snow, was put around it. But 
the bear had grown very suspicious 
by this time, and began by carefully 
pawing away the snow around the 
edges of the hole. He soon found 
the cord, put it aside, and carried off 
the bait as before. 

But white polar bears are some¬ 
times caught and are to be seen in 
most menageries. As they always 
suffer from the heat, blocks of ice 
are kept in their cages, pails of cold 
water are frequently thrown over 
them, and tanks are made for them 
to bathe in. In hot weather they 
may often be seen panting like a 
dog. The polar bear cannot be 
tamed, but always keeps up a stupid 
and brutal fierceness. 

The Grizzly Bear of North America 
is found mostly in the Rocky Moun¬ 
tains and the great plains near them. 
It is the fiercest animal in North 
America, and often grows very large, 
being sometimes nine feet long, or 
half as long again as a man. Its hair 
is shaggy, and usually grizzled, or a 
mixture of black, white, and brown. 

The Black Bear is found in all the 
wild parts of North America. Its 
fur is soft and smooth and glossy 
black. This bear is seldom more 
than five feet long, is timid, and lives 
mostly on vegetable food, although 
when oppressed by hunger it will 
carry off and eat hogs and calves. 
It is a great climber of trees, and 
often robs wild bees of their honey. 
The brown bear of Europe is much 
like it in character and habits. 

The Cinnamon Bear, which lives 
west of the Rocky Mountains, is so 
called because its fur is the color of 
cinnamon. It also is much like the 
black bear in its habits. 


Bears can be taught, by hard train¬ 
ing, to do many tricks which, on ac¬ 
count of the animal’s solemn face, 
grave manners, and clumsy motions, 
are very amusing. They will dance 
to the music of fife and drum, stand 
on their hind legs and carry a stick 
as a soldier does his gun, and even 
jump through a ring with flame 
around it. Tame bears kept about 
a house often get troublesome and 
carry off things from the kitchen 
and pantry. One once tried to carry 
away a pot of hot coffee which 
the cook had set on the hearth, 
but spilled the coffee and burned 
himself. This made him so angry 
that he threw it down and smashed 
the coffee pot with one stroke of 
his paw. His master then fastened 
a log of wood with a chain to his 
collar, so that he could not get into 
the house. But Bruin did not like 
this, and tried in vain to strike off 
the log with his paws. Then he 
dragged it down to the river and 
threw in the log, and got very angry 
because every time he tried to sink 
it it would come to the top again. 
At last he dug a hole, put the log 
in, scraped the earth over it, and 
stamped it down with his feet ; 
and, thinking he had got rid of 
his trouble, started to walk away, 
but found himself worse off than 
before. This made him still more 
angry, and he gave several hard 
jerks which broke the chain, and 
Bruin thus got free, leaving his tor¬ 
mentor buried in the ground. 

The bear is a mammal of the or¬ 
der carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals. 

The word bear is from the Anglo- 
Saxon bera. 

BEAVER, a small animal valued 
for its fur. It is found mostly in the 
northern parts of North America 
and of Asia. It was once common 
in Europe, but is now rare. The 
beaver is usually about two feet long, 
and weighs thirty to sixty pounds, 
or as much as a boy from three to 
six years old. Its color is reddish 





BEAVER 


53 


BEAVER 


brown or chestnut, but sometimes 
black ones are found, and sometimes 
albinos, or white ones. Its fur is of 
two kinds, a soft thick fur which 
grows next to the skin, and long, 
coarse glossy hair on the outside. 
Each foot has five toes, but only 
the hind feet are webbed, so that 
in swimming they only are used, 
the fore feet being folded under 
the body. The tail of the beaver 



Fore Foot of Beaver. 


is large and flat, and is used as 
a scull in swimming. Some writers 
say it is also used as a trowel 
to pound down the earth and clay 
with which it builds its house, but 
this is doubtful. Beavers always live 
near lakes or rivers, and where there 
are plenty of trees, because their 
food is mostly the roots of water 
plants and bark. They build their 


huts or lodges in groups near the 
edge of the water, scraping away 
the earth and mud in front so as to 
make the water deep ; and they also 
dig holes in the banks near their 
huts, with their openings under 
water, into which they fly when their 
huts are attacked. When the water 
of a running stream is too shallow 
to make it free from freezing, they 



Hind Foot of Beaver. 


deepen it by building across it a 
dam of small trees, roots, branches, 
stones, moss, grass, and mud. Their 
teeth are so sharp that they can 
easily gnaw through a trunk five or 
six inches thick. All their work is 
done by night. They always lay up 
in summer a supply of food for the 
winter. 



Tail of Beaver. 


Beavers are hunted both in winter 
and in summer. In winter-time they 
are usually caught in their huts or 
holes, but in warm weather they are 
taken in nets and in traps baited with 
a substance called castor, which is 
got from a kind of pouch in the male 
beaver. Great numbers are killed 
yearly by the Indians and trappers 
in the far West for the sake of their 


furs. Beavers are easily tamed so 
as to answer to their name and to 
follow their master around like a 
dog. They love to be fondled, and 
will creep up into a person’s lap and 
behave much like a petted cat. 

In former times men’s tall hats, 
which are now covered with silk 
plush, were covered with a felt made 
of beaver fur, and were therefore 






BED 


54 


BEE 


called beavers, a name still some¬ 
times given to them. In England a 
law was once (1638) passed forbid¬ 
ding the use of any other material 
for hat-making, and the beaver was 
hunted so much that the supply was 
nearly used up ; but since silk hats 
have been in fashion beavers have 
had some chance to increase in num¬ 
ber. Beaver fur is now principally 
used for the trimmings of ladies’ 
dresses and cloaks, and for men’s 
collars and gloves. 

The beaver is a mammal 6f the 
order rodejitia , or gnawing animals. 

The word beaver comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon beofer , which is from 
the Latin fiber. 

BED. Savages generally sleep 
on the ground on piles of leaves 
or boughs, or on the skins of ani¬ 
mals. The East Indians sleep on 
the floor on light mattresses, which 
they roll up and put away in the 
morning ; the Japanese lie on mat¬ 
ting, resting their heads on a wood¬ 
en rest which fits closely to the neck, 
and the Chinese on low bedsteads 
just raised above the ground. Most 
peoples in Europe have beds and 
bedsteads like those used in this 
country, but German bedsteads are 
shorter than others, and instead of 
sheets and blankets are covered with 
a second mattress made of down, 
almost as thick as the under one. 
The best beds are now made with 
steel springs, covered with mat¬ 
tresses. Mattresses are filled with 
many materials, such as hair, wool, 
cotton, feathers, moss, cocoanut 
fibre, and shavings of paper or wood, 
but horse-hair mattresses are the 
best. Feather beds were once much 
used, but they are not so healthful as 
beds of hair. Pillows and bolsters 
are generally stuffed with hair or 
goose feathers. Beds should be 
turned over every day, so that 
the dampness caused by sleeping 
upon them may not make them 
musty. 

The word bed comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon bedd. 


BED BUG. This insect is found 
in beds and pigeon houses, and in 
the nests of swallows and bats. It 
usually hides away in the daytime, 
and comes out at night to seek its 
food. It bites by pricking through 
the skin with a kind of three-jointed 
sucker, through which it also sucks 
blood. The bed bug has a small 
head and a flat body ; old ones are 
of a rust-red color, but the young are 
so light that one can almost see 
through them. It is hatched from 
oval white eggs, and is full grown in 
eleven weeks. Bed bugs are very 
hard to kill; one has been kept alive 
in a sealed bottle without food for 
more than a year. Cockroaches are 
the enemies of bed bugs, and kill 
great numbers of them. 


E 

1 

Sucker of 
Bed Bug. 

The bed bug is an insect of the 
order hemifitera , or half-winged in¬ 
sects. 

BEE. There were no honey-bees 
in America until they were brought 
here by Europeans, but they are 
now found all over North and South 
America, although they did not 
reach South America until 1845 and 
California until 1850. The Indians 
call them the white man’s fly, be¬ 
cause they go wherever the white 
man settles. 

Bees live in communities or socie¬ 
ties, and are divided into females, 
males, and workers. Each hive has 
but one female, called the queen, 
who governs the society and lays the 
eggs. The males, who do no work, 
are called drones, and there are 
sometimes several hundreds or even 
thousands of them in a hive, there 
being usually one in every thirty 



Bed Bug. 












BEE 


55 


BEE 


bees. The queen bee seldom leaves 
the hive except in the swarming sea¬ 
son, after which all the drones in the 
hive are killed by the workers. The 
workers, who form the principal 



Honey Bee—Queen. 


part of each society, do all the work, 
gathering the honey, making the 
wax and building the cells, and feed¬ 
ing and taking care of the young. 

Bees are very strong, and can fly 
very fast and for a long time with- 



Honey Bee—Drone. 


out lighting. Their eyes are made 
to see at great distances ; when ab¬ 
sent from home they go up into the 
air until they see the place where 
their hive is, and then fly toward it 
in a straight line with great speed, 



Honey Bee—Worker. 


from which the shortest line between 
two places is sometimes called a 
“ bee-line.” This habit of bees is 
well known to hunters of wild honey, 
who often find hives in the woods 


by following bees who are going 
home. Drones have no stings, but 
the females and the workers each 
have one at the back part of the 
body. The sting of a bee is shown 
in the picture. In this a is the place 
where the poison is made, b the tube 
through which it is carried to c, the 
poison-bag, where it is kept for use, 
and d the tube through which it 
flows to the sting. This is made 
of a sheath, e, in which are two 
darts, with sharp points and ragged 
edges like saw teeth, one of which, 



Sting of Honey Bee, much Enlarged. 

e , Stings in Sheath ; f Point of one of 
the Stings. 

much enlarged, is shown in f. 
When a bee stings it first makes a 
wound with the sheath, along which 
the poison flows in a groove ; and it 
then thrusts in the darts to deepen 
the wound. The saw teeth edges 
are very hard to pull out, and bees 
are often so hurt in trying to get 
them out quickly that they die. Bee 
poison is so deadly that a single 
sting will kill an insect, and animals 
and men have been sometimes killed 
by bees which attacked them in 
great numbers. 










BEE 


56 


BEE 


When the queen bee has paired 
with one of the drones, she goes to 
work to lay eggs, laying sometimes 
as many as two or three thousand in 
a day. Worker eggs are first laid in 
one set of cells, and then drone 
eggs in another ; and if the hive is 
very full and it is thought best to 
have another queen, she lays a third 
set of eggs in a third set of cells. 
In three days the larvae, which look 
like small white worms, come out of 



Swarm of Bees. 


the eggs. They are fed by the 
workers with the pollen or dust of 
flowers mixed with honey and water. 
After five or six days more the 
larvae begin to spin a covering or 
cocoon around themselves, from 
which the workers come out, perfect 
bees, in twenty days, and the drones 
in twenty-four days. Queen bees 
are ready to come out of the cocoon 
in sixteen days. If the hive is not 
full the new queens are all stung to 


death in the cells by the old queen ; 
but if the colony is large, one of the 
new queens is permitted to come 
out. As soon as she appears, the 
old queen leaves the hive, taking with 
her a part of the bees, and goes off 
to form a new one. This is called 
swarming, because when they leave 
the hive they usually collect in a 
mass, called a swarm, on the branch 
of a tree, a bush, or some other 
handy place, as shown in the picture. 
If the owner of the bees then sets 
an empty hive near them, they will 
go into it and set to work to make 
wax and honey, just as they did in 
the old one. The new queen of the 
old hive rules until another queen 
appears, when she too leaves and 
founds a colony. When two queens 
come out at the same time, they 
fight until one of them is killed. 

The food of bees is of two kinds, 
the pollen of flowers and sweet 
juices. The pollen is gathered on 
the hairs of their legs and carried to 
the hive for the food of the young 
ones. The juices of flowers are 
licked up by the hairy proboscis, or 
trunk, which serves as a sort of 
tongue. This, which is made up of 
several parts, can be lengthened, 
shortened, twisted, and bent in any 
way, so that it gathers all the sweets 
from the petals and the bottom of 
the flower-cups. If a flower is not 
full blown, the bee will open it wide 
enough to get in its proboscis for the 
juices and its front legs for the pol¬ 
len. Bees also gather a great deal 
of honey from the sweet juices which 
plant lice scatter in little drops 
upon the leaves of trees. Juices are 
carried by the proboscis into the 
mouth, from which they pass into 
the honey bag, a kind of first stom¬ 
ach, where they are changed into 
honey ; but they are not digested, 
for bees have a second stomach for 
the digestion of food. The honey 
can be brought up from the first 
stomach at will, either to feed the 
young or to be stored up in the cells. 
Wax is made only by the working 





BEECH 


57 


BEEF 


bees. They have a pouch in the 
back part of the body in which the 
wax grows little by little. When 
the pouch is full the wax sticks out in 
little scales, and either the bee him¬ 
self or some of his fellow-workers 
take it off and use it in making honey 
comb. The cells in the comb are 
always made six-sided, as shown in 



Cells of Honey Comb. 


the picture, so that no room is 
wasted. They are at first soft and 
white, but soon become firm and 
dark yellow. Cells made for honey 
and pollen are about twice as large 
as those for hatching, and are always 
built with their mouths slanted up¬ 
ward, so as to be easier filled. The 
honey combs, which are begun at 
the top of the hive and built down¬ 
ward, are about an inch thick, and 
are each made up of two sets of cells 
placed back to back. Between every 
two combs is left a space about 
half an inch wide, so that the bees 
can carry honey to the cells. As 
each one is filled, it is sealed up with 
wax. The honey and pollen thus 
stored up serve the bees for food 
during the winter. Farmers often 
take the honey with care out of the 
combs and put the empty combs 
back into the hive to be again filled 
by the bees. 

The honey bee is an insect of the 
order hymenoptera , or membrane¬ 
winged INSECTS. 

The word bee comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon beo. 

BEECH. The beech tree grows in 
Europe and America. In the United 
States it is sometimes more than 


a hundred feet high, or four or five 
times the height of an apple tree, 
and makes a beautiful shade tree. 
It bears little three-cornered nuts, 
which squirrels and other small wild 
animals and some birds like very 
much. They are also fed to swine 
and poultry, and some people eat 
them. In France beech oil is made 
out of them, which is both eaten and 
burned in lamps. Beech wood rots 
easily in the air but not under water, 
and is used for making mill-wheels. 
It is also made into shoe lasts, tool 
handles, bowls, rollers, etc., and in 
France into sabots or wooden shoes. 

The word beech comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon bebce. 

BEEF, the flesh of the ox or 
cow, when killed. Beef is the best 



Animal cut up for Beef. 

a, Porterhouse Steak; b, Sirloin; c, 
Middle Ribs ; d, Fore Ribs ; e, Rump; 
f, Mouse Buttock; g, Chuck Ribs; h, 
Round ; i, Clod ; j, Shoulder ; k, Brisket; 
/, Thin Flank ; /rc, Thick Flank ; n , Leg ; 
o , Shin ; p, Neck. 










BEER 


58 


BEER 


kind of meat for food, and is rich¬ 
er in flavor and more easily di¬ 
gested than any other meat. Good 
ox beef is bright red with yellowish 
fat, and has a loose grain ; cow beef 
is not quite so red, the fat is whit¬ 
ish, and the flesh a little firmer. 
Poor beef, or beef too old for food, 
is usually dark red with hard skinny 
fat. 

An animal for beef is cut up by 
the butcher into parts, as shown in 
the picture. These parts are cut 
into smaller pieces by the retail 
butcher, when he sells the beef to 
families. 

Corned beef is made by soaking 
the lean parts in a pickle made of 
salt, saltpetre, and a little brown 
sugar. Smoked beef is first cured in 
pickle, like corned beef, and then 
smoked over a wood fire. Beef 
cut into thin slices or strips and 
dried in the sun is called jerked 
beef. 

The word beef comes from the 
French bceuf, which is from the 
Latin bos , genitive bovis , an ox. 

BEER, a drink made out of malt, 
hops, and water. Malt is made 
chiefly of barley, though wheat, rye, 
oats, Indian corn, and in India 
rice, are sometimes used. The per¬ 
son who makes the malt is called a 
maltster. He wets his barley in 
great heaps and then spreads it over 
the floor of a dark room, where it 
swells and sprouts just as it would 
if it were planted in the earth. It is 
then dried on the floor of a kiln, 
when the little sprouts drop off and 
are afterward sifted out. The 
sprouting is stopped just at this 
time because the grain then has in it 
the most sugar ; if the sprout was 
allowed to grow more it would use 
up the sugar. The barley, which is 
called malt at this stage, is dried a 
long or a short time according to 
the kind of beer that is wanted. 
For light-colored ale, which is the 
name of several kinds of beer, it is 
dried a short time ; for dark-col¬ 
ored or heavy ale, a longer time ; 


and for porter and brown stout, 
still other kinds of beer, the malt is 
dried until it is browned. Malted 
barley has a much sweeter taste than 
fresh grain, for it has more sugar in 
it. It is also softer and can easily 
be crushed in the fingers. The malt 
is now ground or bruised, when it is 
called grist. The grist is put into a 
large wooden tub and mixed up 
with hot water. Another change 
now takes place in the barley—most 
of the starch in it is turned into a 
kind of sugar called grape SUGAR. 
The water melts this sugar and gets 
from it a pleasant sweet taste. The 
liquid, which is now callecf sweet 
wort, is next drawn off and boiled in 
a great copper kettle with HOPS. 
Hops give the bitter taste to beer, 
so that more or less is put in accord¬ 
ing to the bitterness wanted in 
it. 

After boiling, the liquor is strained 
and cooled as quickly as possible, 
and put into a large vessel called a 
fermenting tun. A little yeast is 
added, and after it has stood a while 
it begins to bubble up and to froth 
at the top, and in a short time a 
change takes place in it. After this 
change, which is called fermenta¬ 
tion, the liquid has a new taste and 
smell ; the sweet taste of the sugar 
is gone, and it is much stronger and 
sharper than before. This is be¬ 
cause the sugar in it has been 
changed by the action of the yeast 
into two things, carbonic acid and 
alcohol. Alcohol is made up of 
just the same things, CARBON, oxy¬ 
gen, and hydrogen, as sugar, 
only they are put together in differ¬ 
ent proportions. When yeast causes 
the sugar to turn into alcohol, it 
simply takes from it some of its oxy¬ 
gen and some of its carbon, and 
forces them to unite, forming car¬ 
bonic acid, which passes off in bub¬ 
bles of gas into the air. All of the 
hydrogen of the sugar remains be¬ 
hind, and uniting with what is left of 
the oxygen and the carbon, becomes 
alcohol. Any liquor which has passed 




BEET 


59 


BEETLE 


through the change of fermentation 
is called a fermented liquor. 

The beer is now put into large 
hogsheads and left to settle until it 
is clear, when it is pumped into 
beer barrels for sale. The German 
beer called lager bier is fermented 
in a different way from ale, the yeast 
being put into the bier in the casks, 
which are then laid up in cool cel¬ 
lars, where the fermentation goes 
on slowly. What we call lager bier 
in this country is properly schenk 
bier , for it is not kept long enough 
in cellars to be called lager , which 
in German means something laid up. 
The name of beer is also sometimes 
given to drinks made from spruce, 
sassafras, ginger, and other herbs 
and roots, but they are generally 
called root beer. The way to make 
beer from malt was first found out 
by the ancient Egyptians. 

The word beer comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon beor, which is from 
bere , barley. 

BEET, a common vegetable, four 
kinds of which are cultivated, the 
common beet, the mangel-wurzel, 
the chard, and the sea beet. There 
are several varieties of the com¬ 
mon beet, all different in shape, 
size, and color. The small red 
and the long yellow are the best 
for table use. Mangel-wurzel beets 
are larger and coarser than common 
beets, but very sweet, and make ex¬ 
cellent food for cattle in winter. 
The chard is a small beet much 
eaten by farmers and laborers in 
Germany and France. The sea beet 
is cultivated in gardens for use as 
greens. 

Beet sugar is made from the juice 
of the white beet. It was first made 
in France in the time of the Em¬ 
peror Napoleon I., who being at war 
with England, would not let British 
cane sugar be brought into the coun¬ 
try. When refined it looks and tastes 
like the best cane sugar. 

The word beet comes from the 
German beete , which is from the 
Latin beta . 


BEETLE. Beetles may be known 
from other insects by the two horny 
sheaths or wing-covers called elytra, 
which cover their true wings so 
closely when they are not flying 
that they look as if they had no 
wings. The wing-covers are often 
very beautiful, being of various col¬ 
ors, blue, green, yellow, etc., and 
sometimes spotted with gold. The 
wings, which fold up under the 
covers very curiously when closed, 
are commonly twice as long and 
twice as wide as the covers. Most 
beetles’ legs are long and fitted for 
running, and they have two strong 
horny mandibles or jaws, made for 
gnawing and chewing. They live 
on different kinds of food, some on 
other insects and worms, some on 


Tiger Beetles. 

carrion, some on rotten wood and 
some on growing wood, some on 
grain, some on roots, and some on 
leaves and flowers. 

Beetles pass through three full 
stages or changes in life. The lar¬ 
vae or grubs have long, flat, worm¬ 
like bodies, with horny heads and 
three pairs of legs; but some, 
which are hatched inside of nuts 
and fruits, have no legs. Before 
going into the second or pupa state, 
the larva often makes a case or co¬ 
coon for itself out of earth or of lit¬ 
tle chips and dust fastened together 
by threads. Larvae sometimes lie 
in these cases for years before turn¬ 
ing into full beetles. 

Beetles are found mostly in woods, 






BEETLE 


60 


BELL 


a cannon. 


under leaves, logs, and stones, 
under the bark of rotting trees, or in 
ditches and beside streams. Some 
live in the water, and may often be 
seen darting over the surface catch¬ 
ing little insects. There are many 
thousand kinds of them, more than 
eight thousand of which live in the 
United States. Tiger Beetles are so 
called from their stripes and because 
they are as fierce among insects 
as tigers are among quadrupeds. 
They prey on caterpillars, flies, and 
other beetles, and will even eat each 
other when shut up together. The 
pictures of two kinds of common 
tiger beetles are given on page 59. 
The Bombardier Beetle is so called 
from its habit of shooting a strong 
liquid from behind at its enemies; 
bombard being an old name for 
Scavenger Beetles have 
feet fitted for digging, 
and make deep holes in 
the ground. They live 
on filth, of which they 
clear up a great deal. 
Some of them are called 
Carrion Beetles because 
they eat up dead ani¬ 
mals. Others, called 
Sexton Beetles, bury the 
bodies of animals. 
They have a very strong scent, and 
when they smell the dead body of a 
mouse, frog, or other small animal, 
they gather round it and examine 
the ground. If it is hard and 
stony, they look for a better place, 
and then a great many of them to¬ 
gether carry the body there ; but if 
the ground is soft they all set to 
work digging with their long legs 
under it till the animal sinks down 
into the hole. They then lay their 
eggs in it, cover it up, and when 
the larvae are hatched they feed on 
it. If they left the body above 
ground, it would dry up and be¬ 
come unfit for their food, or some 
other animal might eat it. Among 
this class of beetles are also those 
commonly called “ tumble bugs,” 
which make little balls out of ma¬ 



nure and then roll them away with 
their hind legs. They lay their eggs 
in these balls, and roll them into 
deep holes which they dig. If the 
road is too rough they lift them up 
on their heads, which are broad and 
flat, and thus carry them. The an¬ 
cient Egyptians thought these ani¬ 
mals were so useful in manuring the 
ground with their balls that they 
called them sacred beetles, and wor¬ 
shipped them. They also carved 
figures of them in gold, precious 
stones, and other materials, and 
wore them as ornaments and charms. 
Many of these are still found in their 
tombs, and are called scarabcei 
(beetles, plural of Latin scarabceus , a 
beetle). 

Other wonderful beetles are the 
stag-horn beetles, whose long jaws 
look like the horns of a stag. Our 
common Horn Bug belongs to this 
class. In some countries this kind 
of beetle is very useful in clearing 
up dead wood in forests. They lay 
their eggs in the bark of trees blown 
down by tempests, and their grubs 
eat up the whole tree, which is thus 
turned to dust and enriches the 
earth. The Spring Beetle or snap¬ 
ping bug is so called because when 
laid on its back it can spring up, 
turn over, and come down on its 
feet. Curculios or weevils are a kind 
of beetles that live on fruits and 
grains, and do great injury to crops. 
The worms found in plums, apples, 
chestnuts, and other fruits come 
from eggs laid in them by beetles. 
The Spanish Fly, which is ground to 
powder and made into blistering 
plasters, is a bright green beetle. 
Fire flies or lightning bugs, lady 
birds, potato bugs, squash bugs, 
June bugs, and many other common 
insects are also beetles. 

The beetle belongs to the order 
coleoptera , or sheath-winged in¬ 
sects. 

The word beetle is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon bitel , which is from bttan, 
to bite. 

BELL. Bells have been made of 




BELL 


61 


BELL 


different kinds of metal, but an al¬ 
loy of copper and tin, called bell- 
metal, is thought to be the best. 
This is usually made of three parts 
of copper to one part of tin, and a 
little zinc and lead are sometimes 
added. Very good bells are now 
made of cast-steel in England and 
Germany. Bells of fine tone have 
been made out of glass, but they 
break too easily to stand long the 
blows of the tongue. In casting bells 
the first thing to do is to make the 
mould, which is built up of fine 
sand. (See Statue.) The core or 
part which fills the inside of the bell 
is first made, and then around this is 
built up the outside, which must be 
as far from the core as the bell to 
be cast is thick. A place is left at 
the top to pour in the metal, which 
is drawn off from the furnace into a 
great crucible or earthen pot. This 
is swung by a CRANE, to which it is 
fastened by chains, over the mould, 
which is in a pit beneath the floor, 
and tipped up and the metal turned 
in as fast as it will run. After cool¬ 
ing, the mould is drawn out of the 
pit, and the bell, which is very rough, 
is finished with chisels and files. 

According to most books the larg¬ 
est bell in the world is the one called 
the king of bells, in Moscow, Rus¬ 
sia ; but there is a larger one in Ja¬ 
pan. The Russian bell is more than 
three times as high as a man (19 
feet and 3 inches), and weighs as 
much as two hundred and twenty 
common cart loads of coal (443,000 
pounds). It has a large piece 
broken out of its side, so that it can¬ 
not be rung, and it is set upon a 
stone foundation and used as a lit¬ 
tle church, of which the broken 
place is the door. The Japanese 
great bell is hung in the tower of a 
temple in the city of Kioto. It is as 
high as four men (24 feet), and is 
sixteen inches thick at the edge. It 
has no clapper, but is rung by means 
of a great beam of wood, which 
strikes it on the outside. Another 
great bell in Moscow is more than 


thirteen feet across at the bottom, 
or about as wide as a fair-sized room, 
and weighs as much as eighty cart 
loads of coal (160,000 pounds). The 
next largest bells in the world are in 
Peking, China, where there are eight 
each weighing as much as sixty 
loads of coal, (120,000 pounds). 
The largest bell in America is in the 
Cathedral of Notre Dame in Mon¬ 
treal ; it weighs nearly as much as 
fifteen loads of coal (29,400 pounds). 
The largest bells in New York are 
those on the fire alarm towers : they 
weigh as much as five loads of coal 
each (about 11,000 pounds). One 
of the most noted bells in this coun¬ 
try is the liberty bell in Independ¬ 
ence Hall, Philadelphia, which was 
rung when independence was de¬ 
clared. It is now cracked so as to 
be unfit for use. Some churches now 
have chimes or peals of bells. The 
best chimes consist of eight to 
twelve bells of different sizes, so 
made that they sound musical 
notes, like those of a piano. Tunes 
can thus be played on them. 

In old times it was believed that 
bells had the power of driving away 
evil spirits ; and so it was the cus¬ 
tom to ring the church bell when a 
sick person lay dying, to frighten 
away the evil spirits which were 
supposed to stand about the foot of 
the bed waiting for his soul. A bell 
rung at such a time was called a 
“ passing bell,” because the dying 
person was passing away to another 
world. Church bells are now tolled 
only after death. Bells were also 
once thought to have the power of 
protecting buildings from lightning 
and tempests, and some church 
bells had the following verse en¬ 
graved on them : 

“ Men’s death I tell by doleful knell, 

Lightning and thunder I break 
asunder, 

On Sabbath all to church I call, 

The sleepy head I raise from bed, 

The winds so fierce I do disperse, 

Men’s cruel rage I do assuage.” 




BELLOWS 


62 


BIRDS 


The word bell is from the Anglo- 
Saxon bellan , to make a loud sound. 
Our word bellow also comes from it. 

BELLOWS, an instrument or ma¬ 
chine for making a blast of air, used 
for blowing fires, for giving air to 
mines, for filling organ pipes with 
wind, etc. Common bellows are 
made of two wooden sides, whose 
edges are joined together by a strip 
of leather, fastened all around to 
both, so that the sides will rise up 
from and close down upon each 
other. Through one of the sides is 
a hole, a , covered on the inside with 
a valve, b, made so that it will 
open and shut like a little door, and 



at the end is a nozzle or small tube, 
c. When the two sides are raised 
up from each other, as shown in the 
picture, the outside air pushes open 
the valve and fills the inside of the 
bellows. On pushing the sides to¬ 
gether again the air inside closes the 
valve, so that it can get out only 
through the nozzle, and as this is 
much smaller than the valve it 
rushes out with much more force 
than it entered and makes a strong 
blast. Another kind of bellows is 
told about under ORGAN. 

The word bellows comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon baelg , a bag, the first 


bellows having been made like a 
bag. 

BERGAMOT, a kind of citron, be¬ 
longing to the same family of fruits 
as the orange, lemon, and lime. It 
is sometimes called bergamot 
orange, as it is round and looks 
much like an orange. From its 
rind is distilled (see Alcohol) the 
oil of bergamot, much used in mak¬ 
ing perfumery, eau de cologne, hair 
oils, essences, and liqueurs. Oil of 
bergamot is also made by grating 
the rind and then pressing it in glass 
vessels. 

The word bergamot is from the 
French bergamotte , named from the 
town of Bergamo, Italy, from which 
the fruit is said to have first come. 

BIRCH, a tree growing in Eu¬ 
rope, Asia, and America, generally 
in cold places. There are several 
kinds, the white birch, which has 
white bark, being the most common. 
It is a very useful tree : in some coun¬ 
tries its bark is made into shoes, 
hats, shingles, boats, drinking-cups, 
and ropes, and its wood is used 
by turners, coopers, and wheel¬ 
wrights. Indian birch bark canoes 
are made out of the bark of another 
kind called the paper birch, which 
grows in Canada and the Northern 
United States. The Indians also 
make beautiful boxes, baskets, buck¬ 
ets, and cups out of it, and thin 
sheets of it are used for paper. The 
black or red birch grows in the 
Southern and Middle States. Birch 
brooms are made from its twigs and 
its branches make the best barrel 
hoops. Russia leather is tanned 
with birch bark, which gives it its 
delightful smell. 

The word birch is from the Anglo- 
Saxon birce or beorc. 

BIRDS. Birds, like mammals, 
are warm-blooded, but they differ 
greatly from mammals in many 
other things. They are all oviparous 
(Latin oviparus , from ovum, egg, 
and parere , to bring forth), that is, 
their young are hatched from eggs 
which are laid by the parent, and 





BIRDS 


63 


BIRDS 


they do not suckle their young. With 
few exceptions they are covered 
with a coat of feathers, which are 
mostly fitted for flying, while among 
mammals only bats can truly fly. 
They have hard horny bills, in 
place of teeth ; and they have a giz¬ 
zard to grind their food, which is 
found in no other animals. 

As birds are much heavier than 
the air, they have to use a great 
deal of strength to fly in it. The 
bones in their wings are much like 
those in the arms and hands of 
man, but the muscles which move 
them are much stronger for their size 
than those in man. All birds which 
use their wings much have a sharp 
strong ridge standing out from the 
front of the breast-bone, something 
like the cut-water or keel on the 
bow of a vessel. On each side of 
this are fastened the muscles, which 
enable them to spread out and work 
their wings so as to raise their bod¬ 
ies into the air and keep them there 
a long time without resting. 

In some birds which do not fly, 
but whose wings aid them only in 
running, as in the ostrich, there is 
no need of such strong muscles, and 
the breast-bone has therefore no 
ridge at all, but is nearly flat, like that 
in man. 

To enable birds to fly, swim, or 
move rapidly on land, it is necessary 
that they should be not only very 
strong but also very light. Their 
bones are therefore made very thin, 
and their whole body is filled with 
numerous air cells. Birds which 
fly highest and fastest have the 
most air cells : the eagle, for in¬ 
stance, has them in all its bones, but 
the ostrich only in its thigh bones. 
The air from the lungs, which is 
much warmer and therefore lighter 
than the outside air, passes into and 
out of these cells at the will of the 
bird, some birds being able to fill 
even the quills of their feathers. 
All this adds much to the lightness 
of the body, but still the bird could 
not fly if his wings were not fitted 


with long FEATHERS, which add 
much to the size of the wings with¬ 
out making them much heavier. 
The feathers on the under side of 
the wing, which strike against the 
air in flying, are larger and stronger 
than the others, and are called quill- 
feathers or simply quills. At the 
base of the quills, on both sides of 
the wing, are smaller feathers called 
wing coverts. The tail feathers, 
which are like the quills of the 
wings and have coverts above and 
below them, serve as a rudder to 
guide the bird in flying and to bal¬ 
ance it in the air. They are also the 
principal ornament of most birds. 
The bodies of birds are covered with 
a thick coat of down and feathers, 
their swift motion in flying being 
apt to cool the blood, just as fast 
motion in a carriage or boat has the 
effect of a cooling breeze; so they 
need warmer clothing than most ani¬ 
mals. Arctic birds are more warmly 
clad than those which live in hot cli¬ 
mates, but the latter have more 
beautiful plumage. Birds moult or 
change their feathers usually once a 
year, and their colors vary much be¬ 
tween summer and winter. 

Birds live on different kinds of 
food : some on flesh alone, some on 
fish, some on insects, some on seeds 
of plants, and some on a mixture of 
all these kinds. Most of them swal¬ 
low their food whole or simply torn 
into pieces. It goes, when swal¬ 
lowed, through the gullet into a first 
stomach called the crop, where it is 
soaked and softened. It then 
passes through another part of the 
gullet, where it becomes mixed 
with a liquid called gastric juice, 
into another stomach called the giz¬ 
zard, which is made up of strong 
muscles, and has a very tough 
leathery lining. This acts like a kind 
of mill, the muscles rubbing the 
two sides of the lining together and 
grinding the food as between mill¬ 
stones. To add to the grinding 
power of the gizzard, birds swallow 
sand and small stones, which aid in 





BIRDS 


64 


BIRDS 


crushing hard food. The gastric 
juice, which is a kind of acid, helps 
to digest the food. The gizzard is 
most perfect in birds which live on 
seeds and grains; in other birds 
it differs according to their food. 
Those that live on fish have no giz¬ 
zard, as their food is easy to digest 
without grinding. 



Inside Parts of Common Fowl. 


The inside parts of the common 
fowl are shown in the picture, in 
which a is the gullet, k the crop, b 
the part of the gullet where the gas¬ 
tric juice is made, c the gizzard, i the 
liver, d, e,f, and h parts of the in¬ 
testine, and g the place where the 
waste parts of the food pass off. 


Birds have most of the senses, but 
those of taste and of touch are gen¬ 
erally very dull. But their sight is 
very keen, especially in birds of 
prey. Their eyes are wonderfully 
made, and are fitted with a kind of 
thin skin or membrane inside of the 
eyelids, which they can draw down 
at will, and which, while they can 
see through it, protects the eyes 
from injury and enables them to 
look at the sun without being dazzled 
by its rays. The nostrils of all birds 
open on the top of the beak, and it 
is supposed that some birds, such as 
birds of prey, have a strong sense 
of smell ; but this is denied by some 
writers. With a few exceptions, 
birds have no outer ear, but they 
all have the sense of hearing. All 
birds have some kind of a cry, but 
many have no song. Both sexes 
call to each other, but of the singing 
birds only the males, as a general 
rule, are able to sing. Water birds 
are more noisy than land birds, and 
tame birds sing more than wild ones. 
Generally birds of bright and beau¬ 
tiful plumage do not sing so sweetly 
as those which are less gayly dressed. 
Many birds change their homes with 
the change of the season. Most of 
those which enliven our fields and 
forests during the summer leave with 
the coming of cool weather for the 
South, where they can more easily 
get food during the winter ; but they 
always return with the spring, and 
many visit the same places year after 
year. 

All birds lay EGGS, mostly in care¬ 
fully built nests, but a few lay them 
on the bare ground or in the sand of 
the sea shore (see Birds’ Nests). 
They hatch their young from the 
eggs by sitting on them, but a few 
leave them to be hatched by the 
sun. The object of sitting on them 
is only to keep up the right amount 
of heat, the warmth of the body be¬ 
ing just enough for this. Equal 
warmth made in any other way will 
do as well. Eggs may be hatched 
by steam or oven heat. When the 








BIRDS 


65 


BIRDS 


time comes for a bird to be hatched, 
it cuts its way out of the shell by 
means of a hard scale fitted to the 
end of its beak, and which soon after 
falls off. Some birds are able to run 
about and to pick up food as soon as 
they leave the shell; others are 
hatched without feathers, and need 
to be fed and cared for by their 
parents for days and even weeks. 

The legs of birds are made much 
like those of man. The feet are di¬ 
vided into toes, usually three in front 
and one behind ; but some, as com¬ 
mon fowls, have a fifth toe or spur 
behind ; some, as the bustard, have 
no hind toe ; some, as the parrot, 
woodpecker, etc., have two toes in 



Foot of Bird of Prey—Falcon. 


front and two behind ; while the 
ostrich has only two toes forward 
and only a part of one behind. 
Birds’ feet vary according to their 
mode of life : some have strong, 
hooked claws ; some long, straight, 
weak ones ; some have the toes all 
separate, and some have them con¬ 
nected with a web or membrane. 

Birds are divided into seven orders, 
according to the shape of their feet 
and claws : 

I. Raptores, or birds of prey, 
which have short stout legs and four 
toes, three in front and one behind, 
all armed with strong curved claws 
or talons made for seizing and hold¬ 
ing their prey. The upper bill in 


these birds is longer than the lower, 
and forms a kind of hook, which 
shuts over the under one. There are 
three families of raptores: 1, vul¬ 
tures ; 2, falcons (including eagles 
and hawks) ; 3, owls. 



Foot of Perching Bird—Lark. 

The word raptores is from the 
Latin rapere , to seize. 

II. Insessores, or perching birds, 
which have short slender legs and 
four long thin toes, three in front and 
one behind, with long, slightly curved 
claws, fitting them for perching on 
trees. They include all the birds 
living in trees, excepting birds of 
prey and the climbers. They are di¬ 
vided into four families : 

1. Cone-billed birds, or those with 
a beak shaped like a cone, includ¬ 
ing the crows (crow, rook, black¬ 
bird, jay, etc.), the finches (larks, 
sparrows, innets, etc.) starlings, 
(meadow lark, oriole, etc.), and 
birds of paradise. 

2. Tooth-billed birds, having a 
tooth or notch near the end of the 



Foot of Perching Bird—Kingfisher. 

beak, including the thrushes (robin, 
mocking bird, cat bird, etc.), warb¬ 
lers (blue bird, chickadee, etc.), and 
fly-catchers (king bird, phebe bird, 
etc.). 

3. Split-beaked birds, whose bills 







BIRDS 


66 


BIRDS 


are divided far back, so that they can 
open the mouth very wide, and thus 
catch insects while flying. Among 
these are the swallows, the goat 
suckers, kingfishers, bee-eaters, and 
others. 

4. Slender-billed birds, whose long 
slim bills fit them for sipping the 
honey from flowers, or for reaching 
into narrow places to catch small 
insects. Among these are the hum¬ 
ming birds, which are found only in 
America. 

The word insessores is from the 
Latin insidere , to sit upon. 

III. Scansores, or climbing birds, 
which are fitted for climbing, having 
two toes in front and two behind. 
Some of these have three toes in 



Foot of Climbing Bird—Woodpecker. 

front, but they have the power of 
turning back the outside one when 
they wish to climb. There are four 
families in this order : 1, parrots ; 
2, toucans; 3, woodpeckers ; 4, 

cuckoos. 

The word scansores is -from the 
Latin scandere , to climb. 

IV. Rasores, or scratching birds, 
whose feet and claws are fitted for 
scratching in the earth. Their chief 
families are : 1, pigeons (including 
doves) ; 2, curassows ; 3, pheasants 
(peacocks, common fowls, turkeys, 
and pheasants proper) ; 4, grouse 
(partridges, prairie hens, quails, 
etc.). 

The word rasores is from the Latin 
radere t to scratch. 


V. Cursores, or running birds, 
marked by the length and strength 
of their legs, and by their small and 



Foot of Scratching Bird—Pheasant. 



Bird—Casso¬ 
wary. 


weak wings. As they do not fly, 
the strips which make up the soft 
parts of their feathers are not 
hooked together by ex¬ 
ceedingly small barbs 
as in other birds. So 
their feathers curl. 

Among them are the 
ostrich, the emu, and 
the cassowary. 

The word cursores 
is from the Latin cur - 
rere, to run. 

VI. Crallatores, or FootofRunning 

wading birds, which ~ 

have long legs like 
stilts, enabling them 
to wade, and long 
necks and bills so 
that they can reach 
their food in the 
water. They live 
mostly on mollusks 
and water worms and 
insects. Their chief fa¬ 
milies are the cranes, 
the herons, the plo¬ 
vers, the snipes (in¬ 
cluding woodcock), 
and the rails. 

The word gral- 
latores is from the 
new Latin grallce , 
stilts. 

VII. Natatores, or 
swimming birds, 
which are web-footed 
—that is, their toes are connected 
with a kind of skin or web so that 
their feet serve as paddles in swim- 



Foot of Wad¬ 
ing Bird— 
Crane. 








BIRDS’ NESTS 


67 


BIRDS’ NESTS 


ming. Their legs are usually short 
and are set back further than in 
other birds, and their necks are long. 
Their families are the ducks (includ¬ 
ing ducks proper, geese, and swans), 
divers, auks (including penguins), 
gulls (including the petrel and the 
albatross), and pelicans (including 
the cormorant). 



Foot of Swimming Bird—Pelican. 

The word natatores is from the 
Latin natare , to swim. 

Birds make up the second class of 
vertebrate ANIMALS. 

The word bird comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon bird or brid. 

BIRDS’ NESTS. Birds differ from 
all other kinds of animals in building 
nests to lay their eggs and to hatch 
their young in. Different birds have 
different kinds of nests : some are 
very simple and rude, and some are 
wonderful in their plan and in the 
way in which they are built. 

Birds may be divided, according 
to their nests, into two great classes, 
those which build on or in the 
ground, and those which build above 
the ground, as in trees, etc. Among 
ground-building birds are included 
all which dive under water, almost 
all which swim, and a large part of 
those which live along the shore and 
wade in the water. Some which are 
classed with the ground-builders 
make no nest at all. Thus many 
water birds lay their eggs on the bare 


surface of rocky cliffs or in sandy 
places along the shore. Among 
land birds the whip-poor-will makes 
no nest, but lays its eggs on dry 
leaves in the woods, and the night- 
hawk drops its eggs on bare rocks 
or sometimes on the flat roofs of 
houses. Other ground - builders 
make hollows in the sand for their 
eggs, and some build nests of reeds, 
sticks, and leaves near the edge of 
rocks near the water. Among these 
last are most of the sea-ducks, 
geese, swans, and gulls. The eider 
duck builds first a rough platform of 
sea-weeds and rushes, and then 
covers it with DOWN taken from its 
own breast. 

It is said that water fowl always 
build their nests on the sides of rocks 
which look toward the west and 
northwest. The archipelago of 
Faroe, between the island of Faroe 
and the Shetland Islands, is a fa¬ 
vorite place for sea birds. There are 
twenty-five great rocks there, called 
Vogelberg (Bird-rock), on which 
birds of many kinds build their nests 
every year. One of these is an im¬ 
mense black rock, more than a quar¬ 
ter of a mile high, formed of many 
layers and ledges which reach to its 
top. Boats can go near it only in 
calm weather, when the sea at its 
foot is smooth. When the weather 
is stormy the sea roars and boils 
around it, and dashes its waves up 
its steep sides nearly as high as a 
steeple, falling back in foaming 
showers. This is the home of mil¬ 
lions of birds, who build their nests 
side by side on its ledges, where 
they may be seen sitting day after 
day, during the hatching season, 
with their heads all turned toward 
the sea. The different kinds of birds 
do not all build their nests together, 
but each kind has a separate place. 
Highest up are the nests of the 
black-backed gulls, next below them 
those of the silver-gull, and below 
them other birds, such as petrels, 
geese, and ducks. While the females 
are seated on the nests, the male 







BIRDS’ NESTS 


68 


BIRDS’ NESTS 


birds perch near them and seem to 
try to amuse them with the clacking 
of their beaks and their cries. 

In Australia is a kind of turkey 
called the brush-turkey which piles 
up a large heap of decaying leaves, 
grass, etc. After the heap has be¬ 
come warm from the rotting of the 
vegetable matter, the brush-turkey 
digs a hole about two feet deep in 
the top, lays its eggs in it, buries them 
and leaves them to be hatched out by 
the heat. These mounds are always 
built like pyramids, and sometimes 
have in them many cartloads of grass 
and leaves. Another kind of bird 
builds high mounds of sand, grass, 
and leaves, and still another makes 
earth mounds sometimes more than 
twice as high as a man and buries its 
eggs deep in them. 

Among other ground - building 
birds are those called miners, which 
either dig deep holes in the earth 
for their nests or use burrows made 
by other animals. The kingfisher 
digs a crooked gallery nearly as long 
as a man in the side of a bank, and 
at its end makes a round hole in 
which it lays its eggs. The sand- 
martin lives in large families or col¬ 
onies, which build their nests in 
holes about three feet deep dug in 
the side of a sand bank ; but when 
the gravel is too coarse the holes are 
made deeper until fine sand is 
reached. The bird begins its hole 
by pecking away the sand with its 
beak, while it clings on to the out¬ 
side of the bank with its sharp 
claws ; but as soon as the place is 
large enough for it to get into it digs 
with its claws and brushes out the 
sand with its wings. At the end of 
the hole it makes a little round cham¬ 
ber and lines it with soft grass and 
feathers. The common petrel (see 
Gull) digs a winding burrow in 
the side of banks, but makes no 
nest in it, laying only one egg on 
the bare earth. Its burrow is some¬ 
times very long, turning now this 
way and now that, and lastly coming 
back under the place where it began, 


and ending in a chamber nearly un¬ 
der the opening. The burrowing 
owl makes its nest in the holes of 
the prairie dogs on the plains of the 
West, and in the burrows of the 
ground squirrel in California. 

Almost all the class of birds 
which include common fowls, tur¬ 
keys, peacocks, pheasants, grouse, 
partridges, and quails make their 
nests on the ground. The wild tur¬ 
key hides hers in tall grass and cov¬ 
ers up her eggs with leaves when 
she has to go off for food. The 
quail, the meadow lark, and other 
birds also hide their nests away be¬ 
side tufts of grass, making a kind of 
arched covering over them. Most 
of the American sparrows nest on 
the ground, but the common house 
sparrow does not. Many of the 
larks, thrushes, and other small 
birds also build their nests on the 
ground. 

The most wonderful birds’ nests 
are those which are built in trees, 
bushes, and other places above the 
ground. Some of these are made of 
a kind of mortar plastered together 
by the birds’ beaks, some are cut 
out by their sharp bills from the solid 
wood of trees, some are beautifully 
woven together from grass and hair, 
and hung from the branches of trees 
or set up in the crotches of limbs, 
and some are made of leaves sewn 
together as neatly as if done with 
needle and thread. Among the 
birds which build their nests of mor¬ 
tar, or moist clay, are the cliff and 
barn swallows of America and the 
house swallow of Europe. The 
cliff swallows build flask-shaped 
nests, like those in the picture, formed 
entirely of mud and plastered against 
the side of high rocks or cliffs. Six 
or seven birds generally work at one 
nest, flying off in all directions and 
coming back with their beaks filled 
with mud, which they soften by 
working before plastering it on the 
nest. One of them, whom we may 
call the master-builder (while the 
others are only masons), sits inside 




BIRDS’ NESTS 


69 


BIRDS’ NESTS 


the nest, smooths down the clay, and 
sees that the work goes on properly. 
The clay, when baked by the sun, be¬ 
comes very hard. In wet weather 
swallows work very fast and soon 
finish their nests, but in dry weather 
they work only in the morning and 
evening, when the clay is moist. Barn 
swallows’ nests are built in much the 
same way, but they are a little dif- 





Nests of Cliff Swallows. 


ferent in shape and the walls are 
usually knit together with bits of 
hay. They are plastered up under 
the eaves and against the rafters of 
barns, and sometimes even of dwell¬ 
ings. Beside the nest is almost 
always built a little platform or 
perch on which the male bird can sit 
and sing to his mate while she sits on 
the nest. It is said that when the 


season is to be cold, the nest is 
nearly closed, with a hole just big 
enough to let the bird in, but that 
when the season is to be very warm 
the nest is open at the top all the way 
across. 

Birds which cut holes in trees to 
build their nests in are called carpen¬ 
ter birds. The chief of these are 
the woodpeckers, whose sharp beaks 
peck away at the hardest living 
trees until a hole fit for the nest has 
been cut. A short tunnel, sloping 
upward, only large enough for one 
bird to go through at a time, is first 
cut, and then a larger hole is made 
downward in the middle of the tree, 
sometimes three or four feet deep. 
The eggs are laid at the bottom of 
this on the small chips that have 
fallen. Both the male and female 
birds work by turns at cutting these 
nests, seldom stopping until their 
house is done. In the plains of the 
West, where there are no trees, 
woodpeckers dig out their nests in 
earth in the sides of banks. 

Eagles and some other birds build 
what are called platform nests, on 
the tops of the highest trees. They 
are made of branches of trees and 
sticks woven together so as to form 
a nearly level floor, and so strong as 
to bear the weight of a man. On 
this, without building any nest, the 
eagle lays her eggs and hatches her 
brood. A few eagles, however, lay 
their eggs on the edges of high cliffs, 
almost on the bare rocks. Pigeons 
also build platform nests of sticks so 
loosely laid together as scarcely to 
hold the eggs laid on them. 

Many birds build rude baskets of 
sticks in the limbs of trees and then 
make a soft nest inside. The mag¬ 
pie, a sly and cunning bird, which 
steals and eats the eggs and young of 
other birds, is very careful to guard 
its own nest by building a strong 
defence around it of sticks and 
thorns woven closely together, as 
shown in the picture. Inside of this 
its nest is made of roots of plants, 
wool, and feathers, plastered to- 







BIRDS’ NESTS 


70 


BIRDS’ NESTS 


gether with mud. The mocking bird 
also builds its nest of fine woven 
roots inside of a wall of brambles 
and thorns. Among the most curi¬ 
ous nests are those made by the birds 



Nest of Magpie. 


called weavers, among which are in¬ 
cluded the orioles and others. The 
Baltimore bird weaves a kind of long 
round pouch, open at the top, out of 
several kinds of grass, fastening it to 
the branches of a tree, and sometimes 
weaving the twigs in with it. It is 



Nest of Weaver Bird. 


very curiously and strongly woven, 
the threads of grass being passed 
through and through as if sewed with 
a needle. There are other kinds of 
weaver birds in Asia and Africa, one 


of which builds nests like that shown 
in the picture, almost always hang¬ 
ing them from the ends of twigs and 
branches, and often over water. 
This is on account of the monkeys 
and snakes, which abound in hot 
countries, and which are the greatest 
enemies birds have. The twigs 
which will bear birds’ nests will not 
j bear the weight of the monkey, who 
I is too cunning to trust himself on a 
slender branch which may break and 
j let him drop into the water. There 
is another weaving bird in Africa, 
called the social weaver, a number of 
which club together and build im¬ 
mense grass canopies like umbrellas 
in the tops of trees, weaving them so 




Nest of Social Weavers. 


closely that they will shed water as 
well as a roof. Under this shelter 
each pair of birds build their own 
nest. 

The tailor bird of India makes a 
still more curious nest than the weav¬ 
ers, for it actually sews the edges 
of leaves together, as shown in the 
picture. After picking out a leaf 
large enough for its nest, it pierces 
rows of holes along its edges with its 
sharp beak, and then sews it up into a 
bag with a long fibre of grass, which 
makes excellent thread. If the leaf 
is not large enough it brings another 
one and sews it on to the first one in 
the same way. It is said that the 







BITUMEN 


7i 


BLACKBERRY 


tailor bird will even make a knot at 
the end of his thread to keep it from 
slipping through. The bag thus 
made is only the outside of his home, 
and after it is done he builds a warm 
downy nest within. The nest is 



Nest of Tailor Bird. 


always at the end of a limber twig, 
so that no mischievous animals can 
reach it, and as the outside is of the 
color of the other leaves it is quite 
securely hidden. There is another 
bird that sews, but which uses only 
short threads just long enough to go 
across once, and ties a knot in the 
end of each piece as it draws it 
through. This bird, called the fan¬ 
tailed warbler, is found in some parts 
of Europe. 

BITUMEN, the general name of 
several kinds of mineral pitch or 
resin. They are all found in the 
earth or in rocks, or bubbling up 
from springs. Some suppose that 
they are vegetable in origin like coal, 
but they differ from coal in many 
ways. The common kinds of bitu¬ 
men are : that which flows like oil, 
such as naphtha or petroleum ; 
that which is both soft and hard, be¬ 
ing either pasty like pitch or hard 
as asphalt ; and that like india rub¬ 
ber, which is soft and springy, and 
will rub out pencil marks. The last 
has been found only in three places 


in the world, in England, in France, 
and near Southbury, Massachusetts, 
but the oil and soft and hard bitumen 
are common in many countries. 

In the island of Trinidad in the 
West Indies is a large lake of bitu¬ 
men, which boils up in the middle, 
but is hard enough to walk upon near 
the edges. There are celebrated 
bituminous springs near the site of 
ancient Babylon, from which the bitu¬ 
men flows like oil, together with salt 
water, on which it floats. It is 
skimmed off and left in the air, when 
it grows hard. The Babylonians 
used this to make cement for build¬ 
ing. There is also much bitumen 
along the Dead Sea in Palestine, sup¬ 
posed to come from springs at its 
bottom. 

The ancient Egyptians used bitu¬ 
men for embalming or preserving 
dead bodies ; and this is what makes 
mummies so black and hard. It is 
now used for covering roofs and ter¬ 
races, for all kinds of work under 
water, and for making walks and 
roads. 

The word bitumen is Latin, and is 
from the Greek pitus , the pine or 
pitch tree. 

BLACKBERRY. The wild bush 
or shrub on which the blackberry 
grows is rightly named the bramble, 
and in England the fruit is commonly 
called the brambleberry. The rasp¬ 
berry bush has the same name, and 
they both belong to the rose family 
of plants. The blackberry grows 
almost all over Europe and Asia, and 
in most parts of North America. In 
the United States are found the high- 
bush blackberry, the low-bush black¬ 
berry, and the dewberry, all of which 
grow wild. There are also several 
cultivated kinds, among which are 
those called the Lawton, the Dor¬ 
chester, and the Wilson. The fruit 
of the cultivated kinds is larger and 
better than the wild fruit. Black¬ 
berries are eaten for dessert, and 
made into preserves, jelly, and jam. 
A kind of wine is also made from 
them. 






BLACKBIRD 


72 


BLACK LEAD 


The blackberry is not a real berry, 
but a collection of stone fruits. 

BLACKBIRD. The bird com¬ 
monly called blackbird in the United 
States is really a starling. In New 
England it is usually called the red¬ 
winged blackbird, because it has a 
patch of scarlet on each wing. This 
bird is found in summer nearly all 
over North America, living usually in 
swamps and low meadows. It 
builds its nest in May in low bushes 
or tufts of grass, and lays three to six 
white eggs marked with blue or pur¬ 
ple. In the early part of the season 
it lives on insects and grubs, but 
when corn is ripening it eats the juicy 
grains and does some damage to the 
crops. Farmers then hunt them, 
and their flesh is very good eating. 

The Crow Blackbird is the purple 
grakle, which also belongs to the 
starling family. It is a large bird, 
but not quite so long as a crow, and 
is blue-black with shadings of green 
and bronze. These birds are found 
from New England to Florida. In 
the spring they follow the farmer’s 
plough and pick up grubs and worms, 
which would destroy a good deal of 
corn, but they also do some damage 
by pulling up corn. They build their 
nests in trees and lay four to six blu¬ 
ish-white eggs, with brown and black 
streaks. 

The European Blackbird belongs 
to the thrush family. It is a fine 
singer, and, like all the thrushes, is 
easily taught. When wild it sings 
only from March to July, especially 
at night, but in the cage it sings 
nearly all the year round. Its mem¬ 
ory is so good that it will learn to 
sing several tunes without mixing 
them, and it will sometimes even im¬ 
itate words. The blackbird should 
be kept in a large cage by itself, as 
it will often peck smaller birds to 
death. It should also have plenty of 
fresh water, as it loves to bathe. It 
will eat bread crumbs, and both raw 
and cooked meat, and, in their sea¬ 
son, likes cherries, elderberries, and 
other berries. This blackbird lays 


four to six pale green eggs, spotted 
with buff. 

BLACKFISH. The common name 
of a fish found on the coasts of New 
England and New York. The Indi¬ 
ans called it the taut; and it is now 
often called the tautog, which is the 
plural of the Indian word. The 
blackfish or tautog is a thick chubby 
fish, without any split in its tail, and 
has a slimy skin covered with small, 
hard scales. Its back and sides are 
black mottled with brown, and its 
lower parts are white. It is caught 
in rocky places near the shore, with 
lobster, crab, or clam bait, and is 
usually eaten broiled or baked. 
Blackfishing is very good sport in the 
spring and early summer. 

BLACKING, a preparation for pre¬ 
serving or polishing boots and shoes, 
harness, and other leather articles. 
It is usually made of bone or ivory 
black, which is mixed with oil, a lit¬ 
tle sugar or molasses, some vinegar or 
sour beer, and a little strong sulphu¬ 
ric acid. Sometimes a little gum 
arabic is put in. All the materials of 
blacking are ground together in a 
paint mill until the paste is smooth, 
when it is put up in the tin boxes in 
which it is usually sold. Blacking 
is sometimes made in a liquid form 
and put into bottles. 

BLACK LEAD, a mineral chiefly 
used for making lead pencils. It 
is wrongly called lead, for there is 
no lead in it. Its proper name is 
graphite, but it is also called plum¬ 
bago. It is grayish-black, soft and 
greasy, and is usually found in lumps 
between layers of slate. The prin¬ 
cipal places where it is mined are 
Cumberland, England; Germany, 
Austria, Siberia, Ceylon ; and in the 
United States at Ticonderoga and 
Fishkill, New York ; at Sturbridge, 
Massachusetts; at Brandon, Ver¬ 
mont ; and at Sonora, California. 
That mined at Ticonderoga is the 
best in the world, being almost pure 
carbon. Black lead is CARBON, but 
is usually mixed with clay, lime, and 
some iron. It is very hard to melt, 




BLOCK 


73 


BLOOD 


on which account it is often mixed 
with clay in making crucibles or 
melting-pots which have to stand 
great heat. Blacking for polishing 
stoves and grates is made from it, 
and it is used to dust the wax 
moulds in making electrotype plates 
(see Printing). It is also smeared 
on machinery and belts to keep them 
from wearing by rubbing. 

BLOCK, a round box or case with 
a pulley or little wheel inside of it, 
much used in the rigging of ships 
for raising and lowering the sails, 
masts, yards, etc. In the article 
Lewis is a picture of a block, show¬ 
ing how it is used in drawing up a 
heavy stone, to which it is made fast 



Blocks. 

a , Sheave; b, Double Block; c, Long 
Tackle Block; d, Snatch Block. 

by the lewis. The rope goes round 
the pulley inside the block, and as 
the pulley turns round like any other 
wheel it is much easier to pull the 
rope over it than if there were no 
wheel in the block. The case of a 
block, which is called the shell, is 
usually cut out of a solid piece of 
elm or other tough wood. The 
pulley, called by sailors the sheave, 
is generally of iron, but sometimes 
of lignum vit.® or other hard 
wood. 

The shape of the sheave is 
shown in the picture in a. Some 
blocks are made with several sheaves 
in them. Thus, b is a double block, 
with two sheaves in it ; and ^ is a 


long-tackle block, with two sheaves, 
one above the other. In d is shown 
a snatch-block, which has a notch 
cut through one of the sides of the 
shell so that the rope which goes 
over the sheave can be lifted in 
and out without the trouble of put¬ 
ting its end in first and pulling it 
through, as has to be done in the 
other blocks. The piece of iron 
around a block to fasten it in its 
place is called a strap. 

The word block is block in Ger¬ 
man and blok in Danish and Dutch. 

BLOOD. In the article Man it is 
told that everything in the body is 
made from the blood. By this is 
meant that the blood gives food to 
all parts of the body, and makes 
them strong enough to grow and do 
their work, just as the sap in plants 
gives life and strength to the stem, 
the branches, and the leaves. Thus 
the blood is the building material of 
the body, just as the sap is the build¬ 
ing material of the plant ; and the 
blood in man and in other animals is 
made from the food which they eat, 
just as the sap of plants is made 
from the' food which they suck up 
from the earth. You cannot see 
blood in food any more than you can 
see sap in earth, and there really is 
no blood in food and no sap in 
earth ; but the stomachs of animals 
take from food what is needed to 
make blood, and the roots of plants 
take from earth what is needed to 
make sap. Blood is made from 
different things in different animals : 
the blood of the cow comes mostly 
from grass and other vegetable food, 
that of wild beasts from flesh, and 
that of man from both flesh and veg¬ 
etable food. This is because the 
STOMACH is made differently in 
each. 

When fresh, blood will run like 
water, and it really has much water 
in it, but it is thicker than water, and 
is not clear like water. To the 
naked eye blood looks like a bright 
red fluid, but when looked at under 
a MICROSCOPE it is seen to be made 








BLOOD 


74 


BLOOD 


up of little round flat red bodies 
floating in a clear fluid. These little 
red discs are so small that if three 
thousand of them were put together 
in a row, like a roll of coins, they 
would stretch along just about one 
inch. When one of them is looked 
at alone it is yellowish, but when 
many are seen together they appear 
bright red. All the color in blood 
is made by these red corpuscles, as 
they are called, corpuscle being from 
a Latin word meaning a little body. 
There are also a few white cor¬ 
puscles in blood, but it is not neces¬ 
sary to tell about them here. 

When blood runs out of the body 
of any animal, it soon becomes 
clotted or thick like jelly. If caught 
in a dish it will in a few minutes be¬ 
come so solid that when turned out 
it will keep its shape like a mould of 
jelly. But if left standing for a few 
hours it will separate into two parts, 
a thick part which has in it all the 
coloring matter of the blood, and a 
thin part much like the white of a 
raw egg ; and this thin part is really 
much the same as the white of egg, 
for it is made up chiefly of albumen 
and water. Most people think that 
blood clots because it gets cool, just 
as jelly does, but this is not so. It 
will clot quicker if it be kept warm. 
It is hard to tell exactly why it clots ; 
all we know is that while it is in the 
body of a live animal there is some¬ 
thing which keeps it fluid, and that 
when it leaves the body it thickens. 

When in the body the blood is 
always moving, carrying to the 
muscles, the brain, the skin, the 
lungs, the liver, the kidneys, and the 
other parts, the things which they 
need, and carrying away those things 
with which they have done. While 
the blood moves all these parts do 
their work, but when it stops they 
all die, starved for the lack of the 
things they need, and choked with 
the things they do not want. This 
movement of the blood is through 
the blood-vessels, of which there are 
two kinds, arteries and veins. The 


arteries are tubes which carry blood 
from the heart to all the parts of the 
body ; and the veins are another set 
of tubes which carry the blood, after 
it has done its work, back to the 
heart again. These arteries and 
veins go into almost every part of 
the body : the arteries divide into 
many branches and grow smaller 
and smaller until each one loses it¬ 
self in a network of tubes as fine as 
hairs, called capillaries (Latin capil- 
lus, a hair), which finally come to¬ 
gether again and form a vein. To 
understand exactly how the blood 
travels through the arteries to all 
parts of the body and is then 
squeezed through the capillaries into 
the veins, through which it returns 
to the place it started from, ready to 
go round again, you ought to know 
all about the way the heart acts ; 
but as this is hard to show without 
a heart to look at, I shall tell about 
it in as few words as possible. 

The human heart is about as 
large as a man’s fist, and is shaped 
something like the figure which we 
commonly call a heart. It lies in 
the body between the lungs, with the 
point slanting toward the left lung. 
It is a kind of bag with a network of 
muscles wrapped round it, and is 
divided up and down into two sepa¬ 
rate parts. Each of these parts is 
again divided crosswise, or nearly 
so, for the upper and lower parts 
connect with each other. Thus the 
heart is divided into a right half and 
a left half, and each of these halves 
is again divided, but not completely 
so, into two parts, making an upper 
and a lower chamber ; so that in 
all there are four chambers, two 
upper and two lower ones. The 
two upper ones are called the right 
and the left auricle, and the two 
lower ones the right and the left 
ventricle. The right auricle opens 
downward into the right ventricle, 
and the left auricle opens in the 
same way into the left ventricle. 

Now, by looking at the picture 
you will be able to understand just 





BLOOD 


75 


BLOOD 


how the blood goes round, or circu¬ 
lates, as it is called. But you must 
remember that this does not show 
the circulation just as it is, but only 
the principle of it. If you had no 
arms nor legs, and only a few cap¬ 
illaries in your lungs and a few more 
in the lower part of your body, it 
might look something like this ; but 
the capillaries are in all parts of the 
body, in the head as well as in the 
other parts. The picture therefore 
only shows the principle on which 
the blood works. In this the dot¬ 
ted line h stands for the heart; d 
is the right auricle, g the right ven¬ 



tricle, e the left auricle, and f the 
left ventricle. To see how then 
blood goes round through the body, 
suppose that the right auricle d is 
full of blood. The blood first passes 
down into the right ventricle^-, then 
upward into the lung-arteries b, 
from which it passes through the 
lung-capillaries and down through 
the great lung-vein c into the left 
auricle e ; it then passes into the left 
ventricle/, from which it passes down 
through the great artery /, called the 
aorta, from which it passes through 
all the other arteries and through 


the capillaries /, into the veins k , and 
then upward through the great vein 
into the right ventricle again. Thus 
the blood has travelled all the way 
round, after visiting by means of 
the capillaries all parts of the body, 
and come back to the right auricle, 
where it started. So the blood has 
really two circulations, one through 
the lungs, marked a in the picture, 
and the other through the other 
parts of the body, marked l in the pic¬ 
ture. The right side of the heart re* 
ceives all the veins from the body 
and sends all its arteries to the lungs, 
and the left side receives all the 
veins from the lungs and sends its 
arteries all over the body. 

You have thus learned that the 
blood is always travelling in the same 
way, from the right over to the left 
side, and then around to the right 
side again. The reason of this is 
that the heart is a kind of PUMP. 
You will remember that in the pump 
there is a little door called a valve 
which lets water pass through it one 
way but will not let it flow back 
again. It is the same in the heart; 
between the right auricle and the 
right ventricle is a valve which lets 
the blood flow through, but will not 
let it go back again ; and there is 
another valve between the right ven¬ 
tricle and the great lung-artery, and 
two like ones on the left side of the 
heart. 

I have said that the heart is a kind 
of bag divided into four parts and 
covered with muscles. These mus¬ 
cles are all the time at work, squeez¬ 
ing together these parts and then 
letting them go again. First the two 
auricles are squeezed up, both at 
the same time, and then, just as the 
muscles have done, the ventricles are 
squeezed up ; then the muscles let 
go of the ventricles, and for a brief 
space the heart is quiet; the auri¬ 
cles then begin again, and so on, 
first one and then the other, all the 
time, night and day, while the body 
is alive. This squeezing up of the 
different parts forces the blood 






BLOOD 


76 


BLOOD 


from one to the other, and keeps 
pushing it through the arteries and 
the veins until it comes round to the 
heart again. Thus the restless heart 
is all the time pumping and forcing 
the life-giving blood into all parts of 
the body, so that every bit of it is 
bathed by fresh blood. The beat¬ 
ing of the heart may be seen and 
felt on the left breast. Many peo¬ 
ple think this is the pumping of the 
blood, but it is really caused by the 
striking of the point of the heart, 
which I have told you lies toward the 
left side, against the chest. When 
the muscles squeeze up the ven¬ 
tricles, the point of the heart is 
thrown a little forward, and gives a 
thump on the chest. When the 
blood flows through an artery, it 
goes in little throbs, caused by the 
pumping of the heart, there being 
always one throb to each heart beat. 
Doctors usually feel the throb of the 
artery in the wrist, and this is called 
feeling the pulse; but the pulse 
may be felt in any part of the body 
where there is an artery, for ex¬ 
ample, on the temple or on the in¬ 
side of the ankle. 

The blood which goes through 
the arteries looks different from 
that which passes through the 
veins. Blood taken from an artery 
has a bright scarlet color, while 
blood from a vein is of so dark a 
purple that it is called “ black 
blood.” There is one exception to 
this. In the arteries which go to 
the lungs the blood is dark, and in 
the veins which come from the 
lungs the blood is light. This will 
be seen by looking at the picture, 
where b shows dark blood going 
through arteries to the lungs, and c 
red blood coming through veins 
from the lungs. This is because 
the dark blood has to pass through 
the lungs to become changed to red 
blood. 

Scarlet blood is commonly called 
arterial blood, and black blood ven¬ 
ous blood. The principal difference 
between them, besides their color, 


is that arterial blood has more oxy¬ 
gen and less CARBONIC ACID in it 
than venous blood. In the article 
Lungs is told how every breath of 
air which is breathed in gives oxy¬ 
gen to the blood ; and in the arti¬ 
cle Stomach is told how the blood 
takes up the good parts of the food 
which we eat. Now the greater 
part of this food is CARBON, which 
is needed to supply fuel to the body, 
just as the carbon in wood and coal 
is needed for the fuel of an engine ; 
and as the carbon in wood and coal 
is burned by uniting with the oxy¬ 
gen of the air, so the carbon of the 
blood is burned by uniting with the 
oxygen which the blood takes in 
through the lungs. Wood and coal 
give off heat in burning, and heat is 
the power which causes the engine 
to move ; food also gives off heat 
in burning, and this heat too is 
the power which gives our bodies 
strength to do what we want them 
to do. 

Now, let us go over this once 
more, so that it may be thoroughly 
understood. The food which goes 
into the stomach is there digested, 
and the good parts pass into and 
become part of the blood. The 
blood, driven by the heart’s pump, 
is forced through the arteries and 
into the capillaries, by means of 
which it reaches almost every part 
of the body ; and as it is also draw¬ 
ing oxygen from the air every time 
it goes round through the lungs, it is 
thus always carrying through the 
arteries fuel to burn, and oxygen to 
burn it with, to muscles, bones, 
nerves, brain, and skin. Burning is, 
therefore, going on in all parts of 
the body, and thus the arterial 
blood, which is rich in oxygen, is 
changed into venous blood, which 
has but little oxygen in it. From 
mqst places where this burning is 
going on the venous blood goes 
away the hotter for it, and all this 
hot blood carried through the veins 
keeps the body warm and gives it 
the power and the strength to act. 




BLOOD 


77 


BLOWPIPE 


Every part of the body is wearing 
away little by little and is being 
made anew by the blood. The same 
blood makes different things in 
different parts ; the bones and mus¬ 
cles get strength from it, and the 
brain and nerves power to feel. The 
arterial blood, in thus refreshing 
and building up every part of the 
body, loses its oxygen, which unites 
with the carbon and forms carbonic 
acid ; and this is the reason why it 
is dark-colored when it goes back to 
the heart through the veins. It is 
then pushed again through the 
lungs, where it loses its carbonic 
acid and takes in more oxygen, and 
goes down into the left side of the 
heart and becomes arterial blood 
once more. 

There is also some other waste 
matter in the blood besides carbonic 
acid which has to be got rid of. 
Much water passes off through the 
lungs when we breathe, and a good 
deal also and various SALTS pass off 
from the blood through the skin as 
perspiration. Urine also, which is 
made up chiefly of water, ammonia, 
and salts, comes from the blood 
through the kidneys. The kidneys 
are little bundles of long tubes 
bound up in a round mass. Small 
blood vessels lead to these, and as 
the blood passes through the urine 
dribbles into these little tubes, which 
unite into a larger tube that leads 
into the bladder. 

Thus the impurities of the blood 
pass off chiefly through three chan¬ 
nels, the lungs, the skin, and the 
kidneys ; but it is possible that some 
waste things are used up in other 
parts of the body, for the waste of 
one part is not exactly like the waste 
of another. 

Sometimes when a person has lost 
much blood from sickness or acci¬ 
dent, some of the blood of a healthy 
person is squirted into his veins. 
Not enough is taken from the heal¬ 
thy person to hurt him, and the 
other is often made well by it. It 
was once thought that the blood of 


a sheep or other animal might thus 
be used, but it is now known that 
the blood must be of the same kind 
as that with which it is to be mixed. 
About four hundred years ago a 
physician tried to save the life of 
Pope Innocent VIII. by putting into 
his veins the blood of boys ; but it 
was so carelessly done that three 
boys, from whom the blood was 
taken, died, and the pope was not 
helped any. 

The Old Testament forbids the 
eating of blood, and therefore the 
Jews eat only the meat of animals 
killed by being bled to death. 

The word blood is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon blod. 

BLOWPIPE, a tube for blowing 
air across the flame of a candle, 
lamp, etc. It makes a pointed flame 
which is very hot, and which may 
easily be turned upon anything so 


Blowpipes. 

as to heat it. The blowpipe marked 
b in the picture is one much used by 
jewellers. A better form is the one 
marked a, which is a tube about 
eight inches long, small at the top, 
where the mouth-piece is, and wider 
at the bottom, which is closed. 
Near the bottom a small pipe, with 
a fine pointed end, leads out of it. 
When this small end is put into the 
flame of a candle and the tube is 
filled with air by blowing or breath¬ 
ing into it, the flame is blown out 
into a long point which is much hot¬ 
ter than common flame. This is be¬ 
cause more OXYGEN is thus blown 











BLUEBIRD 


78 


BLUE JAY 


into the flame than it would com¬ 
monly get from the air. The blow¬ 
pipe is used in soldering metals 
by jewellers and gold and silver¬ 
smiths, and by chemists, and others. 
The glass-blower’s blowpipe is told 
about under Glass. 

The Oxyhydrogen Blowpipe is 
used when a very great heat, much 
greater than can be got in any other 
way, is wanted. This is made of two 
tubes, one inside of the other. The 
inner tube is joined to a gas-bag 
filled with oxygen, and the outer 
one to a gas-bag filled with hy¬ 
drogen. The hydrogen gas is 
first turned on and lighted at the 
end of the tube, and then the oxy¬ 
gen is slowly let on, both of the bags 
being pressed with a weight so as to 
force the gas through the pipes. 
The two gases mix together at the 
end of the tubes where they are 
lighted, and blow the flame out into 
a fine point, which is so very hot that 
almost anything can be melted in 
it. 

BLUEBIRD. The bluebird is 
found only in North America. In 
the United States it flies northward 
in early spring and is one of the first 
birds to appear in New England after 
the snow begins to melt. For this 
reason it is always welcomed as the 
messenger of spring. It spends 
the winter in the Gulf States and in 
Mexico. 

The bluebird is bright sky-blue 
above, and yellowish-brown below. 
Its song is a soft, full warble. It 
usually builds its nest near a house 
in some sheltered place, such as 
a hole in a tree, or a rail-hole in a 
fence-post. It also likes a little box 
like a martin box, and will often 
fight with the wrens for one. It 
lays five or six pale-blue eggs, and 
hatches several broods in a season. 
When the nest is attacked by snakes 
or other animals, both the male and 
the female will defend it with great 
courage. Bluebirds live mostly on 
insects in summer, and on cedar-ber¬ 
ries and fruits in autumn. They 


may be easily tamed, and they 
make very pretty pets. 

The bluebird belongs to the order 
znsessores, or perching BIRDS, and 
to the warbler family. It gets its 
name from its color. 

BLUEFISH. This fish is some¬ 
times called horse-mackerel and 
sometimes skipjack. The bluefish 
is usually one to three feet long, 
and is bluish-black on the back and 
whitish below. It comes along the 
coast of the Middle United States 
in the spring, following the weakfish 
and mackerel, on which it feeds, and 
is caught during all the summer 
months and until late in the autumn 
along the New England coast. It 
is a very greedy fish, and may often 
be seen chasing the mackerel, spring¬ 
ing out of water, and following them 
so closely as to drive many on 
shore. It also feeds largely on sand 
eels. It will bite at almost any¬ 
thing moving quickly through the 
water, and is usually caught by 
trolling behind a sail-boat a line 
fitted with a squid, or piece of lead 
or bone made like a fish, and a hook. 
The bluefish snaps at it, thinking it 
to be a small fish, and gets caught 
on the hook. Sometimes a thing 
called a spoon is used instead of 
a squid. This is usually silver- 
plated, and is made hollow like the 
bowl of a spoon, which causes it to 
whirl round and round when drawn 
through the water. When a blue¬ 
fish is hooked the line must be drawn 
in quickly and steadily, for this fish 
is so strong and lively that it will 
often run ahead and unhook itself. 
In the last of summer and the fall 
the bluefish is very fine eating. 

The bluefish belongs to the same 
family with the mackerel. It gets 
its name from its color. 

BLUE JAY. The blue jay is found 
only in America. It sometimes stays 
all the year round in New England, 
but usually goes south in autumn. 
Its color is purplish-blue above and 
whitish below, with lighter blue 
wings and tail marked with black 




BOBBIN 


79 


BOBOLINK 


bands, and in some places tipped 
with white. On its head is a beau¬ 
tiful blue crest. The blue jay is 
noisy, mischievous, and quarrel¬ 
some. It is a great scamp and robs 
the nests of other birds of their 
eggs and young, and when these 
fail it steals from the farmer’s crib. 
Its usual note is a harsh scream, 
but it is a great imitator of voices 
and sounds. It seems to take great 
delight in frightening other birds by 
screaming like a sparrow hawk and 
then wailing like a little bird in pain. 
The negroes in the Southern States 
believe that the blue jay is the agent 
of the devil, and that it carries to 
him all sorts of slanderous stories 
about colored people. They there¬ 
fore take great delight, whenever 
they catch one, in wringing its 
neck. 

If taken from the nest when quite 
young the blue jay may be easily 
tamed. It will become much at¬ 
tached to its owner, and will readily 
learn to talk, but not so well as the 
parrot. It is very vain of the few 
words it speaks, and likes to show 
off before strangers. 

The blue jay belongs to the order 
insessores, or perching birds, and 
to the crow family. It gets its name 
from its color. 

BOBBIN, or SPOOL, a little roller 
with raised ends, to wind yarn or 
thread upon. Bobbins are largely 
used in spinning and weaving. In 
laying the warp threads for making 
CLOTH, the threads are first wound 
upon bobbins. The little reel or 
spool in the shuttle, on which the 
weft thread is wound, is a bobbin. 
The bobbins used in making bob¬ 
bin-net LACE are usually made of 
iron. The spools or bobbins on 
which cotton thread is wound for 
the retail trade are turned on the 
bobbin LATHE, from little blocks of 
hard wood. A boy feeds it by drop¬ 
ping the blocks into a kind of box 
called a hopper, and the machine 
turns them and drops them out one 
by one all finished at the other end. 


It will make fifteen hundred spools 
in an hour. 

The word bobbin is in French bo- 
bine. 

BOBOLINK. This bird is found 
only in America; it passes the 
winter usually in the West Indies, 
and comes northward in the spring, 
travelling mostly by night, reaching 
New England in May. At this time 
its plumage is black, varied with a 
little yellowish-white on the rump 
and tail-feathers, and with a patch 
of brownish-yellow on the back of 
the neck. Bobolinks live in cool, 
grassy meadows, which they make 
cheerful with their merry song, made 
up of a mixture of short notes sung 
so quickly that it sounds as if a 
dozen birds of different kinds were 
singing all together. The female 
makes her nest of dried grass on 
the ground, and lays five or six 
purplish-white eggs, blotched with 
darker purple, and spotted at the 
larger end with brown. While she 
is sitting, the male bird flits about 
and cheers her with its song. To¬ 
ward the end of June the bobolink 
ceases singing and changes its suit 
of glossy black for one of rusty- 
brown, its lower parts becoming dull 
yellow. It now flies away to the 
banks of the Delaware and Schuyl¬ 
kill rivers, where it feeds on the 
seeds of the wild rice and gets very 
fat. In that part of the country it is 
called the reed bird, and is much 
hunted by sportsmen. Later, in Sep¬ 
tember and October, it goes to the 
rice fields of the South, where it 
grows so fat that it can scarcely fly, 
and when shot will often burst open 
as it strikes the ground. In the 
Carolinas it is called the rice bird, or 
rice bunting, and it is highly es¬ 
teemed for eating. Still later it 
appears in Cuba and other of the 
West India Islands, where it fat¬ 
tens still more on the seeds of the 
guinea grass, and is called the but¬ 
ter bird. 

The bobolink may be tamed, if 
taken when young from the nest, 








BOLT 


80 


BONE 


and it makes a very pretty and 
sprightly pet, but it will sing only in 
spring and summer. It may be 
treated in the same way as the cana¬ 
ry, whose notes it will quickly learn. 

The bobolink belongs to the order 
znsessores, or perching BIRDS, and 
to the finch family. 

BOLT, a strong pin, usually of 
metal, used to fasten or hold some¬ 
thing in place. A common bolt is 
much like a large nail or spike, only 
it is generally round. In ship-build¬ 
ing many kinds of bolts are used ; 
they are usually of iron or of copper, 
and differ in size from a few inches 
to several feet in length. Some of 
the longest ones, used for bolting to¬ 
gether very thick and heavy timbers, 
are as large round as a man’s wrist. 
These long bolts are usually fastened 
in by clinching—that is, by hammer¬ 



ing down the end so that it cannot 
be pulled back again through the 
hole, or by driving a plug of iron 
through a hole in the end. 

A Screw-Bolt or tap-bolt is a bolt 
with the end made like a screw, 
which holds it firmly in its place. 
It has no slit across the head for a 
screwdriver, as in a common screw, 
but has to be screwed into wood by 
means of a wrench. 

A Bolt and Nut is a bolt which is 
fastened in place by a movable piece 
called a nut, which is screwed on to 
the end. The one shown in the 
picture is a kind used in making 
ploughs. The screw itself does not 
hold on to the wood, as in the screw- 
bolt, but is meant only for the nut; 
and when the nut is screwed on, the 
bolt really has two heads. Such 
bolts are much used by carriage- 


makers and stove-makers, and also 
by railroad and bridge builders. 
The fish-plates which hold the ends 
of rails on railroads are fastened 
with bolts and nuts. 

The word bolt is Anglo-Saxon, 
and formerly meant a short arrow 
used in a cross-bow. The iron bolt 
was probably so called because its 
shape is something like that of the 
cross-bow bolt. 

BOMBAZINE, a kind of twilled 
cloth having a silk warp and a 
worsted weft. Black bombazine is 
worn by ladies for mourning. It is 
made mostly at Norwich, in Eng¬ 
land. 

The word bombazine is from the 
Latin bombycinus , silken, which is 
from the Greek bombux , silk. 

BONE, the substance of which 
the skeleton of most animals is 
made. Bone is chiefly made up of 
gelatine, a kind of colorless and 
tasteless jelly ; of phosphate of lime, 
which makes more than half its 
weight; and some other earthy 
matter. If bone be soaked in weak 
ACID all the earthy matters will be 
taken out, leaving only the gelatine, 
which will be of the same shape 
and size as the bone, but will be 
soft and elastic or springy. If, on 
the other hand, bone be burned in a 
hot fire all the gelatine will be burned 
and only the earthy matter will be 
left ; this will at first keep the form 
of the bone, but the least touch will 
make it crumble to dust. 

Bones are largely used in the arts, 
being worked up into handles for 
knives and forks, tooth and nail 
brushes, combs, buttons, etc. When 
burned in an open fire and ground, 
bones are made into bone ash, 
which is largely used for manure. 
When carefully prepared, bone ash 
is called burnt hartshorn, and is 
used for cleaning jewellery. It is 
also used for making PHOSPHORUS 
for tipping matches. 

Bone black, sometimes called ani¬ 
mal charcoal, is a black powdered 
charcoal, made by burning bones 








BOOK 


81 


BOOK 


in a close vessel called a retort 
and then grinding them fine. It 
has the power of taking all the color 
out of most liquids, and leaving 
them clear as water. It is much 
used for refining the syrups of 
sugar, and for taking the impurities 
out of water and other liquids. It 
also has the power of absorbing or 
taking up odors, especially bad 
smells, and is used to purify rooms, 
clothing, etc. 

Bone dust, obtained by grinding 
bones, is largely used as a manure. 
Plants take up from the soil certain 
salts, which are sometimes returned 
as ashes. When animals eat grass¬ 
es and plants, the salts in them are 
made into bone. Hence, when the 
bones of animals are ground up and 
put upon the land as manure, some 
of the salts are returned to the soil 
from which they were taken. 

The word bone comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon ban. 

BOOK. Paper like that which is 
now used was unknown in ancient 
times. The Egyptians wrote on a 
kind of paper called papyrus, made 
from the inner bark of the papyrus 
plant, which grew in Egypt, and 
this came into general use in all 
countries. Parchment, made from 
the skins of sheep and calves, fur¬ 
nished a more lasting writing mate¬ 
rial, but its cost was much greater. 
Books of papyrus and of parchment 
were generally made in one long 
narrow piece, and wound around a 
wooden roller, just as a wall map is 
rolled up. When unrolled these 
books were sometimes several hun¬ 
dred feet long. Books of this kind 
were used by the Greeks and Ro¬ 
mans, and by all other ancient peo¬ 
ples, but they also had books made 
of wood, ivory, bronze, and other 
metals, and these were generally 
square or oblong, like our books, 
and were made of several sheets 
or leaves bound together. This 
more convenient form at last came 
into use everywhere, and since 
the invention of printing nearly 


all books have been made in this 
shape. 

There are many sizes of books. 
A common sized school reader is 
a i2mo, or, as it is called in Latin, 
a duodecimo ; the next larger size 
is 8vo, or octavo, and then follow 
4to, or quarto, and folio. The 
next smaller size to i2mo is i6mo, 
then i8mo, then 32mo, and then 
36010. When these names were 
first given to books they were used 
to mean the number of leaves into 
which the sheet of printing paper 
was folded in making a book. For 
example, a sheet folded once, so as 
to make two leaves, was called a 
folio ; folded twice, making four 
leaves, a quarto ; and folded three 
times, eight leaves, an octavo. But 
these words now mean rather the 
size of the page than the number of 
folds in the sheet. Folio and quarto 
books are not easy to handle, and 
are now seldom printed ; the most 
common sizes are 8vo for large 
works, and i2mo and i6mo for 
small books. 

The making of a book properly 
begins with the author who writes 
it. The book as it comes from the 
writer’s hands is called a manuscript. 
It should be written only on one 
side of the sheet, because it is hand¬ 
ier for the printer who sets up the 
types. When the manuscript is 
done, the next step is to publish it, 
that is to have it printed, bound, and 
brought before the public. Authors 
sometimes publish their books them¬ 
selves, but it is customary for a pub¬ 
lisher to do this for them. Every 
author has by law a right to share 
in money made from the sale or use 
of his books during a certain number 
of years. This right is called a 
copyright. He may either sell all 
his copyright to the publisher for a 
sum of money, or he may sell it for 
a certain part of the profits. This 
is the usual way. The publisher 
now puts the manuscript into the 
hands of the printer, to be printed. 
(See Printing). A very few pub- 




BOOK 


82 


BOOK 


lishers have printing offices of their 
own, but most of them have their 
printing clone somewhere else. The 
number of copies of a book printed 
and published at one time is called 
an edition. An edition is usually 
one thousand copies. When the 
book comes from the printer it is in 
large flat sheets, printed on both 
sides. In a i2mo book, each sheet 
has twelve pages printed on one side 
and twelve on the other, so placed 
that when the sheet is folded the 
pages will come in right order. 

The book is then sent to the bind¬ 
ery to be bound, that is to have the 
covers put on. The sheets are first 
taken to the sheet-room, where they 
are folded, gathered together, and 
sewed. A 12mo book of four hun¬ 
dred pages is printed on seventeen 
sheets of paper. At the bottom of 
the first page of each sheet is 
printed a figure or letter called the 
signature, which marks the number 
of the sheet. When the sheet is 
folded, it forms a little pamphlet of 
twelve leaves or twenty-four pages, 
with the signature at the bottom of 
the first page. If you look at page 
1 of such a book, you will see the first 
signature at the bottom ; if you then 
count twelve leaves or twenty-four 
pages beyond, you will find the sec¬ 
ond signature at the foot of page 25 ; 
the third at the foot of page 49, and 
so on. The folding of the sheets is 
usually done by girls. A girl can 
fold about three hundred sheets in 
an hour ; but folding machines are 
sometimes used which fold twelve 
hundred sheets an hour. When 
the sheets are all folded they are 
piled on the gathering table, all of 
each signature being in one pile. 

A person called the gatherer then 
walks round the table, picking up 
one from each pile, until he has all 
the signatures of a volume collected 
in the right order in his hand. The 
volume thus gathered then passes to 
another person called the collator, 
who examines the signatures to see 
if they are in proper order, and then 


puts them evenly together. The vol¬ 
ume is now pressed tightly in the 
smashing machine and five little 
grooves or channels are sawed 
across the back. These grooves are 
cut to receive the chords or bands to 
which the sheets are to be sewn. 

If you will open this book and 
look at the top or bottom of it, you 
will see that it is made up of a num¬ 
ber of small parts. Each of these 
parts is a signature. Now find the 
first page of one of these signatures, 
count six leaves or twelve pages on¬ 
ward from it, and you will find the 
middle of the signature. By open¬ 
ing the book wide, you will see the 
five grooves and the thread with 
which the part is sewn to the bands. 
The girl who sews the book has be¬ 



fore her a frame called a “ sewing- 
bench,” like that shown in the pic¬ 
ture, up and down which are tightly 
stretched three pieces of strong 
twine, just wide enough apart to fit 
into the three middle cuts in the 
back of the book. The girl piles up 
a number of books beside her and 
then takes up the first signature 
and holds it so that the pieces of 
twine, which are called the bands, 
are closely pressed into the cuts. 
She then passes her needle through 
the upper cut and down the middle 
of the signature, passing under the 
bands at each of the three middle 
cuts, thus fastening the signature 
firmly to the bands. The other sig¬ 
natures are fastened to the bands in 
the same way, and when all are 















BORAX 


83 


BOTTLE 


sewed the bands are cut above and 
below the signatures, leaving about 
an inch of the twine on each side. 
These ends are afterward pasted to 
the covers of the book, thus strength¬ 
ening the binding. You can prob¬ 
ably see little ridges caused by them 
on the inner edges of the cover. 
Many books are now sewn by ma¬ 
chines, which do the work faster 
than it can be done by hand. 

After sewing the book goes to the 
forwarding room, where the front 
edge is cut smooth in a machine. The 
back is then beaten round by a ham¬ 
mer and smeared with glue, so as 
to hold the parts firmly together. 
The two ends are now trimmed 
smooth in a machine, and the book 
is ready for the cover. The cover is 
made of two pieces of thick paste¬ 
board, called millboard, and is 
usually covered with muslin fast¬ 
ened on with glue. The lettering 
and ornamenting on muslin covers 
are done before the cover is put on 
to the book. They are stamped on 
by means of metal DIES in a ma¬ 
chine made for the purpose. If the 
cover is to have gilded figures on it, 
the gold leaf is laid on first in a 
sheet with a little sizing or thin 
glue ; it is then pressed with a hot 
die, which stamps its form on it, 
and the rest of the gold leaf is then 
brushed off. The cover is next fast¬ 
ened on with paste, and the book 
is then pressed until dry. Books 
bound with morocco and other costly 
materials are done in a somewhat 
different way. After the book is 
finished it returns to the hands of 
the publisher, who sells it and gives 
the author his share of the amount 
of the sales. 

The word book comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon boc> which is from 
beoce , beech tree ; and it was so 
called because beechen boards were 
used to write on. 

BORAX, a SALT formed of boric 
acid and carbonate of soda (so¬ 
dium carbonate). Boric acid, also 
called boracic acid, is made up of 


an element called boron united 
with HYDROGEN and OXYGEN. 
Much boric acid is brought from 
Tuscany, where it comes out of 
cracks in a volcanic mountain in a 
white vapor or steam. The vapor is 
made to bubble through water as it 
rises, and is thus mixed with it, and 
the liquid is then boiled down until 
the water passes off in steam, leav¬ 
ing the acid in hard clear crystals 
something like common salt. This 
boric acid is afterward mixed with 
the alkali carbonate of soda, and 
the two unite and form the salt 
called borax. Borax is also found 
native, that is by itself, in several 
parts of the world, especially in 
India, China, Persia, and Ceylon ; 
and, in the United States, in Califor¬ 
nia and Nevada. 

Borax is a colorless salt, with a 
greasy feel, and a smell like soap. 
When heated it melts into glass, 
which mixes easily with the oxides 
(see Oxygen) of metals, and be¬ 
comes colored by them. For this 
reason it is much used for making 
ENAMELS, artificial or false gems, 
and paints and glazes for pottery. 
It is also valuable for cleansing, 
and is used instead of soap in wash¬ 
ing the gum out of silk, instead of 
soda in washing clothes, and in clean¬ 
ing the hair. Cockroaches do not 
like it, and may be driven away from 
houses by scattering it where they 
are. 

The word borax comes from the 
Arabic btirak. 

BOTTLE, a small hollow vessel 
made usually of glass or earthen¬ 
ware. In ancient times bottles were 
made of the skins of animals, mostly 
goats ; and such bottles are still 
used in Spain and Italy for carrying 
wine, and in Asia and Africa to 
carry water in. The ancient Egyp¬ 
tians had bottles of earthenware, 
glass, ivory, alabaster, and different 
metals. 

The ancients made their GLASS 
bottles by blowing them with a 
blowpipe, a hollow iron tube about 




BOTTLE 


84 


BOW 


five feet long. The end of the blow¬ 
pipe was dipped into the melted 
glass, and enough taken up to make 
one bottle. The glass maker then 
blew gently through the tube, which 
swelled up the glass like a soap bub¬ 
ble, and while it was still soft shaped 
it with an iron tool. Bottles are now 
sometimes made in the same way, 
but they are usually pressed in a 
mould. The hot glass is taken up 
at the end of the blowpipe, and the 
blower then rolls it round and round 
on an iron table, called a marver, 
blowing gently through the tube at 
the same time. As soon as he 
thinks it is shaped right, he puts it 
into a mould like that in the picture. 
After closing the two parts, he 
blows gently through the blowpipe, 



which forces the soft glass into every 
part of the mould, and causes it to 
take the print of any letters or fig¬ 
ures engraved on the inside of it. 
The mould is then opened, the bottle 
taken out, and an iron rod, called a 
punty, is fastened by a little melted 
glass to its bottom. By touching a 
cold iron or a wet stick to the end of 
the neck it breaks off from the blow¬ 
pipe, and the bottle then passes to 
the finisher. The finisher has a 
bench with two arms to it. He lays 
the punty across these arms and 
turns the bottle round and round by 
rolling it with one hand while he 
forms the neck of the bottle with the 
other. Several kinds of tools are 
used to shape the mouth. After it is 


done the bottle is taken off from the 
punty and put into an oven, where 
it is heated almost hot enough to 
melt, and then allowed to cool 
slowly. This, which is called an¬ 
nealing, toughens the glass, and 
makes it less apt to break. 

The word bottle is from the French 
bouteille . 

BOW. Before it was found out 
how to make gunpowder, bows and 
arrows were used in war and in hunt¬ 
ing instead of guns. We read about 
them in the Bible, and pictures of 
them are engraved on many ancient 
monuments. In old times battles 
were usually begun by shooting ar¬ 
rows, which were fired by soldiers 
called bowmen or archers, of whom 
there were sometimes many thou¬ 
sand in one body. The bows used 
were very large and strong, and the 
arrows had sharp points made of 
iron or copper. They were shot 
with such force that they often went 
clear through the body of a man or 
a horse. Soldiers wore iron armor 
and carried shields on their arms to 
protect themselves against them, but 
arrows sometimes went through both 
armor and shields. 

Among modern archers, the Eng¬ 
lish were the most famous, and 
many of their battles were won by 
their skill with the bow and arrow. 
In early times shooting matches 
were held, where prizes were given 
to the best shot, just as in our rifle- 
matches ; and many wonderful sto¬ 
ries are told of the skill of some of 
the marksmen. The English bow, 
usually called the long bow, was 
made of yew or ash wood, and was 
six feet long. The arrows, which 
were of ash, were a yard long, just 
half as long as the bow, and were 
tipped with steel and feathered with 
goose feathers. The long bow was 
so much liked as a weapon by the 
English that it was used in their 
armies even in Queen Elizabeth’s 
time, when the gun had taken its 
place almost everywhere else. 

Bows and arrows are now used 


















BOX 


85 


BRAKE 


only by savage peoples, like the 
North American Indians, or as play¬ 
things. Another kind of bow, called 
crossbow or arbalast, was also used 
in former times. In this the bow, 
which was much shorter than the 
long bow, was fixed across the end 
of a stock like a gun-stock. 

The word bow comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon beogan, to bend or 
curve. 

BOX, a hard kind of wood, much 
used by wood-engravers and turn¬ 
ers. The box tree is an evergreen, 
with shining deep-green leaves. 
In Asia and in Southern Europe it 
often grows more than three times 
as high as a man. Its wood, which 
is light-yellow, is very tough, heavy, 
and fine-grained, and takes a fine 
polish. It is the best of all woods 
for wood-engraving, and it is also 
used for making fine rules, and 
flutes and other musical instruments. 
Large quantities of it are brought 
from Turkey, the Greek Islands, and 
Spain. The dwarf box grown in gar¬ 
dens is a kind of the same tree. 

The word box is Anglo-Saxon, 
and comes from the Latin buxus, 
Greek ftuxis , the box tree. 

BRAKE, a machine for stopping 
a wheel, or for making it turn 
slowly, by pressing a rubber against 
it. Brakes are sometimes used on 
loaded wagons, to check them when 
going down hill; but their chief use 
is on railway cars. The common 
brake is made up of a block or rub¬ 
ber made to fit the outside of the 
wheel, a lever, one end of which is 
made fast to the block and the other 
to a chain, and a windlass on the 
platform of the car to wind up the 
chain. The way in which it works 
is shown in the picture, where a is 
the windlass, on the platform of the 
car. When the brakeman turns the 
windlass, the chain is wound up 
around the shaft. This shortens the 
chain, and pulls forward the upper 
end of the iron bar b, which presses 
the brake-block h against the car 
wheel j, and at the same time pulls 


the iron rod^, which pulls the iron 
bar c, and presses the brake-block d 
against the car-wheel k. Thus the 
two brake-blocks are pressed hard 
against the two wheels, and this 
tends to stop them. At the same 
time, in pulling the rod c , the rod e 
is also pulled, which presses other 
brake-blocks against the wheels of 
the next truck (see Railroad) ; and 
there are like rods and other brake- 
blocks on the-other side of the car, 
so that when the windlass is turned 
all the wheels are pressed and the 
car is thus stopped by friction, or by 
the rubbing of the blocks against 
them. 

In the Creamer Brake, the blocks 
are pressed against the wheels by 



the power obtained from a very 
strong spring, coiled up in a round 
box at the bottom of the windlass on 
the platform of the car. The brake- 
man can use it by turning the wind¬ 
lass, or it can be worked by pulling 
the rope in the car. The Westing- 
house Air Brake is worked by the 
elastic power of compressed air con¬ 
tained in an iron box on the engine. 
Under each car is a round iron bar¬ 
rel about the size of a small keg, 
which is joined by pipes with the 
iron box on the engine. When the 
engine driver wishes to stop the 
train, he opens a valve which lets 
the compressed air rush from the 
box into the barrels. This forces 
out a piston in each cylinder (see 
Steam Engine) and these act upon 
all the blocks on the wheels of the 
cars at once, and stop the train very 
quickly. 















BRANDY 


86 


BRAZIL WOOD 


The word brake is made from the 
Latin brachium , the arm, meaning 
strength. 

BRANDY, a liquor made out of 
grape wine by distillation. (See 
Alcohol). It is usually about half 
alcohol and half water. In the 
United States brandy is made out of 
the fermented juice of fruits, like the 
cherry, peach, pear, and apple. 
Apple brandy is sometimes called 
cider brandy; and pear brandy, 
perry. All these brandies differ 
from brandy made from wine only 
in the flavor given to each by the 
fruit from which it is made. Wine 
brandy when first made is white, 
but it becomes colored by the wood 
of the cask. This color, which 
grows deeper as the brandy grows 
older, is sometimes made in new 
brandy by putting burnt sugar into 
it. The best brandy is made in 
France, but little of it is pure. A 
great deal of whiskey is sent from 
the United States to France, where 
it is made into a false brandy and 
sent back here for sale. 

The word brandy was formerly 
brandy-wine. It comes from the 
German Branntwein, burnt wine, 
which is made up of brcinnt, burnt, 
and wei 7 i, wine. 

BRASS, an ALLOY of copper and 
zinc. It is usually made of two parts 
of copper and one part of zinc, but 
sometimes more copper is used, 
and sometimes a little tin and lead 
are added. Brass is largely used 
for the ornamental parts of machin¬ 
ery, the pipes of organs, tubes of 
telescopes, stair rods, buttons, pins, 
tacks, screws, etc. It is also some¬ 
times used instead of bronze for 
statues, because the tin in bronze 
makes it more costly. Pinchbeck, 
oreide, Mannheim gold, tombac, 
and other alloys that look like jew¬ 
ellers’ gold, are kinds of brass, as 
they are made principally out of cop¬ 
per and zinc. Brass was known in 
very ancient times, and is supposed 
to have been worked even before 
iron. 


The word brass is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon braes. 

BRAZIL NUT, the fruit of a large 
tree found chiefly on the Orinoco 
River in South America. The nuts 
are three-sided, with hard dark- 
brown shells, and the meat, which 
is all in one piece like an almond 
nut, is white inside and covered with 
a thin dark skin. When fresh they 
are very good to eat, but as they 
have much oil in them they soon 
spoil. This oil is sometimes pressed 
out for use in lamps. 

Brazil nuts grow on the tree in a 
smooth round case, half as large 
as a man’s head. Inside of this the 
three-sided nuts are packed closely 
together, with the sharp edge in¬ 
wards, somewhat like the parts of an 
orange, as many as twenty or thirty 
being sometimes in one case. It is 
dangerous to pass under the trees 
when the fruit is ripe, as the nut 
cases, which are heavy enough to 
break a man’s skull, are apt to fall. 
Sometimes the cases burst open 
when they strike the ground, and 
this is at once the signal for an 
amusing scramble among the monk¬ 
eys, who swing themselves down 
from branch to branch by the help 
of their tails, and fight furiously for 
the nuts, of which they are very 
fond. The monkeys, too, often 
pick the cases and throw them 
down to break them. This has 
taught the Indians how to get the 
nuts : they pelt the monkeys with 
stones, and the monkeys hurl down 
the cases full of nuts at them. In 
this way large quantities are col¬ 
lected on the banks of the Orinoco, 
and brought down the river in boats. 

The Brazil nuts are so called be¬ 
cause most of them are brought 
from Brazil. 

BRAZIL WOOD, a red dyewood, 

used in dyeing silks. The tree from 
which it is got grows in the West 
Indies and in Brazil, but most of the 
wood is now brought from Brazil. 
Only the heart of the tree is used for 
dyewood, the rest being of no value. 




BREAD 


87 


BRICK 


The red dye is got by boiling the 
wood in water. It makes a very 
fine red, but is not very lasting. By 
using ACIDS and ALKALIES, shades 
of orange, yellow, violet, and purple 
are made from it. It is also used for 
making red ink. An African wood, 
called camwood, brought from Sierra 
Leone, is now much used instead of 
Brazil wood. 

The word Brazil is from the Por¬ 
tuguese braza , meaning glowing 
embers, a name given to this wood 
on account of its color. The coun¬ 
try of Brazil got its name from the 
wood, because a great many of these 
trees are found there. 

BREAD. Of all FOOD bread is 
the most important, and it is used 
in some form in almost every coun¬ 
try in the world. It is made prin¬ 
cipally from wheat, although rye, 
barley, oats, Indian corn, and rice 
are much used in it. In Africa it is 
made sometimes of the pith of the 
sago palm, in Southern Europe of 
ground chestnuts and acorns, in 
Lapland of a kind of moss, and in 
South America of the seeds of a 
kind of pine tree. In the South Sea 
Islands the bread-fruit, and in the 
West India Islands the banana, are 
largely used instead of bread. 

The best bread is made from 
wheat FLOUR. In the most ancient 
times the grain was merely pounded 
in a mortar or between two stones, 
and then wet with water and baked 
before a fire. Such bread was not 
raised or spongy, but was solid and 
hard. It was called unleavened 
bread, because it had no leaven or 
yeast in it. If you look at a slice 
of wheat bread you will see that it is 
full of little holes, which prevent its 
being solid, hard, and tough. Such 
bread is called leavened or raised 
bread. 

The way of making leavened 
bread by raising it with yeast was 
early found out, it is supposed by 
the Egyptians. In making bread the 
flour is first worked into a paste, 
with about half its weight of water ; 


a little yeast is then added, and the 
dough is put for several hours into 
a warm place to rise. This is caused 
by fermentation, which is told about 
in the article Beer. The yeast 
causes the sugar in the flour to fer¬ 
ment, and changes it into ALCOHOL 
and CARBONIC ACID. The alcohol 
passes off as steam into the air, but 
the carbonic acid works its way all 
through the dough in little bubbles 
of gas, which are kept in by the 
sticky GLUTEN of the flour, and the 
whole mass rises or becomes puffed 
up with it. When it is light enough 
the dough is worked again with 
some salt, made into loaves and 
baked in an oven. The carbonic 
acid gas swells with the heat during 
the baking and bursts out, leaving 
the little holes which we always see 
in bread. 

As long as fresh bread is warm, 
fermentation is going on, and as this 
makes bread hard to digest, it is 
best not to eat it until it is cold. 
Baked bread always weighs more 
than the flour ; a pound of flour will 
make about a pound and a quarter 
of bread. Bread made from rye or 
barley is as good for food as wheat 
bread, except that it does not digest 
so easily. Aerated bread is made 
without yeast by mixing the flour 
with water which has carbonic acid 
in it. Baker’s bread is not so 
wholesome as home-made bread be¬ 
cause poorer flour is generally used, 
and alum and other unhealthful 
things are put into it to make it white. 
Graham bread is made from wheat 
flour, out of which the pieces of 
shell of the grain, which are called 
bran, have not been bolted or sifted. 
It is much eaten by people with weak 
stomachs. 

The word bread comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon breod. 

BRICK, a building material made 
of clay, moulded into blocks, and 
burned. The clay, if too rich, is 
mixed with a little sand or ashes, 
which keeps the brick from crack¬ 
ing. It is then ground in a mill 





BRICK 


88 


BRIDGE 


until it is soft like putty, when it is 
moulded into the right shape in a 
little box with a loose bottom, so 
that when the sides are lifted up the 
brick is left on the bottom. This is 
the old way, but bricks are now 
more commonly moulded by a ma¬ 
chine forming a part of the mill 
which grinds the clay, and which 
will make about twenty thousand 
bricks in a day. After being moulded 
the bricks are well dried in the sun 
and then piled up loosely in great 
stacks called kilns, with holes under 
them to build fires in, and flues left 
open up to the top, so that the heat 
and gases of the fire will pass freely 
through the whole pile. It once took 
about two weeks to burn a large kiln 
of bricks, but some makers now- 
mix the dust of anthracite coal in the 
clay, and thus burn them in three or 
four days. Bricks in a kiln are not 
all burned alike, some being baked 
too much and some not enough. 
Those not burned enough are put 
into the next kiln and baked again. 

Bricks are not usually red until they 
are burned ; their color comes from 
the oxide or rust of iron, which is 
rusted more by fire. If the clay 
has not much iron in it, the bricks 
will be lighter in color. Milwaukee 
bricks have no iron in them, and are 
of a cream color. Building bricks 
are usually two inches thick, twice 
as broad as they are thick, and twice 
as long as they are broad. Fire 
bricks are made of kinds of clay that 
will not melt in fire, mixed some¬ 
times with ground stones. They are 
used to line furnaces and stoves 
with, and are moulded in the proper 
shapes to fit the places where they 
are to go. 

Bricks have been used for building 
from the most ancient times. The 
walls of Babylon were built of bricks 
laid in BITUMEN. The Egyptians, 
Greeks, and Romans made excel¬ 
lent bricks ; some of the bricks in 
Roman buildings have lasted better 
than the stone used with them. The 
Chinese make bricks with a face like 


porcelain. (See Pottery). Many 
bricks are now moulded in hand¬ 
some designs and are used in archi¬ 
tectural decorations ; and some are 
chiselled like stone into ornaments 
after they are put up in buildings. 
The sun-dried bricks of which 
houses are built in California and 
Mexico are called adobe bricks. 

The word brick is in French 
brique , and comes probably from an 
old word meaning clay. 

BRIDGE, a roadway over a 
stream, a valley, or low ground. A 
bridge for carrying a canal or water 
to supply a city is called an aque¬ 
duct (water leader) ; one over which 
a railway passes is sometimes called 
a viaduct (road leader). The first 
bridges were made of wood by laying 
beams from one bank of a stream to 
the other, or, when these were too 
wide apart, resting them on posts or 
stone piers in the middle. The Chi¬ 
nese built bridges at a very early 
date, but it is supposed that the Ro¬ 
mans were the first to make stone 
bridges, and some of them, more 
than a thousand years old, are still 
in use. 

There are many splendid stone 
bridges in Europe, but few of much 
size in the United States. The finest 
are the High Bridge of the Croton 
Aqueduct, over the Harlem River, 
and the Starucca Viaduct on the Erie 
Railway. But the United States have 
the best wooden bridges in the 
world. These are made of timbers 
put together in such a way as to 
brace and support each other. The 
bridge over the Susquehanna River 
at Havre de Grace is three fifths of 
a mile long. 

As wooden bridges are apt to 
catch fire, those made of iron and 
steel are now taking their place on 
railway lines. Among the most 
wonderful of these are the wrought 
iron bridge over the Menai Strait, 
called the Britannia Bridge, and the 
Conway Bridge, both in Great Brit¬ 
ain, and the Victoria Bridge over the 
Saint Lawrence River at Montreal. 




BRIDGE 


89 


BRONZE 


These are all what are called tubu¬ 
lar bridges, being made of great iron 
tubes or pipes, through which rail¬ 
way trains run. The Victoria Bridge 
is a huge square iron tube, two miles 
long, held up over the river on great 
stone piers. Some of the finest iron 
and steel railway bridges in the 
United States are those over the 
Mississippi River at Saint Louis and 
at Rock Island, and that over the 
Ohio River at Louisville. 

Among the most remarkable 
bridges are those not held up from 
below but hung on some kind of 
ropes or chains, and called therefore 
suspension (Latin suspendere , to 
hang) bridges. The Chinese built 
this kind of bridge out of iron chains 
in very ancient times, and the Peru¬ 
vians made them out of bark ropes. 
Modern suspension bridges are 
built of large and strong cables, 
made out of many small wires 
twisted together. The great bridge 
now building over the East River, 
from New York to Brooklyn, is sus¬ 
pended by four such cables, each 
as thick as a very large man’s 
waist (16 inches). Other suspension 
bridges in this country are those 
over the Ohio River at Wheeling 
and Cincinnati, and that at Niagara 
Falls. Among the finest in Europe 
are that at Fribourg in Switzerland, 
and that over the Danube at Pesth. 

Bridges are sometimes made so 
that they can be moved in order to 
let a vessel pass. These are of va¬ 
rious kinds : draw bridges are made 
to raise and lower ; swing or turn 
bridges, to turn round on a pivot ; 
and rolling or sliding bridges, to roll 
backward and forward on little 
wheels or rollers. Bridges that are 
to be used for only a little while, 
like those built in war time by sol¬ 
diers to cross rivers, are sometimes 
made by fastening many small boats 
together and building a floor over 
them. Casks and rafts have also 
been used for the same purpose. 
Military bridges are usually sup¬ 
ported by floats called pontoons, 


made of frames* of timber covered 
with copper, tin, leather, tarred sail¬ 
cloth, or India-rubber cloth, or of 
copper cylinders. The pontoons are 
laid from bank to bank and securely 
fastened, and the bridge platform is 
then laid upon them. 

The word bridge comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon bricge. 

BRIMSTONE. See Sulphur. 

BROADCLOTH, a fine kind of 
woollen cloth, so called because it is 
wider than other cloths (56 to 60 
inches). It is woven very closely, 
and has a smooth shiny surface. 
It was once largely used for men’s 
coats, and still is, especially for even¬ 
ing dress ; also for ladies’ cloaks. 

BROCADE, a silk stuff, sometimes 
woven with gold and silver threads, 
so as to show gold and silver fig¬ 
ures on it, and sometimes woven 
with all silk, so as to make a beau¬ 
tiful pattern of raised flowers, foli¬ 
age, and other figures. Brocade is 
now seldom made with gold and 
silver threads, because they lose 
their brightness so easily. It is used 
mostly for curtains and for covering 
furniture, but sometimes for ladies’ 
dresses. 

The word brocade is from broc- 
cata , the Italian name of this cloth. 

BRONZE, an alloy made by 
mixing copper and tin, to which 
zinc and lead are sometimes added. 
Gun metal, from which cannon are 
cast, contains about nine parts of 
copper and one part of tin, and bell 
metal about three parts of copper and 
one part of tin. Modern French 
bronze, out of which most of the 
small bronzes sold in the stores are 
made, contains about nine parts of 
copper, and one part made up of 
zinc, tin, and lead. In making 
bronze the copper is first melted in 
the furnace, the tin and other met¬ 
als are then put in, and the whole is 
stirred until it is well mixed. (See 
Statue.) 

As bronze costs a good deal, many 
imitation or false bronze ornaments 
are made, which look like real 






BROOM 


90 


BRUSH 


bronze, but are* much cheaper. 
Many figures and other small orna¬ 
ments for mantels and many gas- 
fixtures are made of it. They are 
usually cast in zinc or some other 
cheap metal, and covered with a kind 
of paint or varnish, which gives 
them the look of bronze. Orna¬ 
ments made of wood, clay, and plas¬ 
ter are also sometimes bronzed in 
this way. But some cheap orna¬ 
ments are covered with a real coat¬ 
ing of bronze or copper. 

In old times, before it was known 
how to use iron, all kinds of tools 
and weapons were made of bronze, 
and that time is called by historians 
the bronze age ; the time before it, 
when only stone tools and weapons 
were known, is usually called the 
stone age, and the time when iron 
came into use the iron age. The an¬ 
cients knew how to harden bronze 
so that swords, knives, axes, chisels, 
and other tools made of it would cut 
as well as steel ones ; but we do not 
know how they did it. 

The word bronze comes from the 
Italian bronzo, which is perhaps 
from bruno y brown. 

BROOM, a brush for sweeping 
floors, so named because it is 
usually made of the broom corn 
plant. The broom corn plant grew 
first in India. It is said that Dr. 
Franklin planted a single seed, 
which he took from a whisk of 
broom corn brought from England, 
and that from it have sprung all the 
broom plants now in this country. 
The plant, which grows more than 
twice as high as a man, looks some¬ 
thing like Indian corn ; but the head 
or brush, from which brooms are 
made, is much larger than that of 
Indian corn. Broom corn bears no 
ear, the seeds being all on the brush. 
The brushes are cut off when ripe, 
leaving about six inches of stalk on 
each, and are freed from the seeds 
by means of a machine called a 
“ scraper,” which scrapes them off 
without hurting the broom corn. 
The seed is fed to horses and poul¬ 


try, and sometimes, when ground 
into meal, to cattle. 

Brooms are made in this country 
mostly by the Shakers. The han¬ 
dles are usually of soft maple wood 
turned round in a LATHE. The 
twine for tying the broom is wound 
on a roller. The end of it is fastened 
to the broom handle, one end of 
which is cut down smaller than the 
rest, and as the broom corn is laid on 
the whole is turned so that the twine 
winds round and fastens it. Layer 
after layer of broom is put on, the 
twine winding round each one, until 
the broom is large enough, when the 
twine is cut and fastened. The 
broom, which at this stage is round, 
is now pressed out flat and sewed 
with twine to keep it so. Whisk 
brooms are made in the same way. 

The word broom is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon brom. 

BRUSH. Most brushes are made 
of bristles, the long, stiff hairs 
which grow on the neck of the hog. 
Bristles, great quantities of which 
are sent from Russia and Germany 
to other countries, are of many 
colors and sizes. Brush-makers first 
sort them according to color, putting 
the black, brown, gray, yellow, and 
white ones in different piles. The 
whitest ones are called “ lilies,” and 
are used for making tooth brushes. 
Each color is then sorted again by 
pushing the bristles through a row 
of steel teeth, like a comb, which 
catch the coarse ones ; by passing 
them through several such combs, 
each finer than the other, the 
bristles are all separated into dif¬ 
ferent sizes. 

Many brushes, such as hair and 
clothes brushes, are made by draw¬ 
ing bunches of bristles, which are 
bent in the middle, through holes 
in a stock or handle made of wood, 
bone, or some other material. This 
work is mostly done by women, 
who sit round a table, on the edge 
of which the stock is held tight by a 
clamp. Each woman has a lap full 
of bristles, and in her right hand a 





BRUSH 


9i 


BUFFALO 


piece of fine brass wire. She makes 
a loop in the wire and pushes it 
clown through one of the holes; 
then taking some of the bristles in 
her left hand she lays them in the 
loop, which she next pulls back 
through the hole. The bristles are 
thus doubled up and held by the 
wire. When all the holes have been 
filled the ends of the bristles are 
clipped even with shears. A back 
piece is then glued on, which covers 
up the wires and the bristles and 
holds them tight. In some hair 
brushes there is no back piece : the 
holes are bored not quite through 
the stock, and the bristles fastened 
in with wire and glue. Tooth 
brushes have no back piece, but the 
bristles, which are bent and put into 
holes as in hair brushes, are held 
by wires which are put through lit¬ 
tle holes made from the end. If you 
look at the end of a tooth brush, you 
will see where the little holes have 
been stopped up. In some tooth 
brushes slits for the wires are cut in 
the back, and after the wires are 
fastened the slits are filled up with 
red sealing-wax. 

In making large paint brushes, the 
bristles are gathered into a bundle 
around the small end of the handle 
(thus leaving the large end sticking 
out of the front of the brush), and 
tied tightly with twine. The brush 
is then set on a board with a hole in 
it, through which the handle is driv¬ 
en till the large end of it is in the 
middle of the brush. This tightens 
the strings which hold the hairs. 
The back of the brush is then cov¬ 
ered with glue. 

Small paint brushes, used by 
artists, are made of the hair of the 
camel, badger, sable, squirrel, and 
other animals. Enough hairs to 
make one brush are tied together 
and then passed point first through 
the large end of a quill, which has 
been softened by soaking in water, 
until the point comes far enough out 
of the small end. When the quill 
dries it becomes smaller and holds 


the hairs tight. Such brushes are 
sometimes called pencils. 

The word brush is from the Ger¬ 
man borste, a bristle. 

BUCKSKIN, the tanned skin of 
the deer, the male of which is called 
a buck. After tanning it is dressed 
by what is called the oil-process : 
all the rough parts of the skin are 
cut off and smoothed, and it is then 
dried and rubbed full of a mixture 
of oil and tallow and laid aside until 
this soaks in. It is next rubbed 
with a board until it is soft and pli¬ 
able. Buckskin is much used for 
polishing silverware and jewellery, 
and for rubbing furniture. In old 
times short breeches were often made 
of it, and were therefore called 
“buckskins.” Most of the so- 
called chamois or “ shammy” 
leather now sold is buckskin, and 
not the skin of the chamois, as its 
name would pretend. 

BUCKWHEAT. The French call 
this grain Saracen wheat, because 
the Saracens or Moors are believed 
to have brought it into Spain from 
the East. It is much valued as a 
crop in France, Germany, and the 
United States. A white flour is 
made from its grain, which in Ger¬ 
many is made into gruel, in France 
into bread, and in the United States 
into breakfast cakes. The grain is 
good food for horses and poultry. 

The word buckwheat is from the 
Anglo - Saxon boc - hwcete , beech- 
wheat, which is made up of boc, 
beech-tree, and hwate, wheat. The 
plant was so called because its grains 
are shaped like beechnuts. 

BUFFALO, the name commonly 
but wrongly given to the wild cattle 
of North America, which are not 
buffaloes, but bisons. The true 
buffalo is found only in India and in 
South Africa ; but the name has 
been given so long to the American 
bison that it will probably always be 
called a buffalo, and his hide a 
buffalo robe. Buffaloes were once 
found almost all over North Amer¬ 
ica, but they have been hunted so 






BUFFALO 


92 


BULLET 


hard that there are none now east of 
the Mississippi River, and they are 
very scarce in the settled parts of the 
West. But on the great western 
plains there are still immense herds 
of them, which wander from one 
part of the country to another, in 
search of good pasturage, water, 
and salt springs. In the winter they 
usually go southward, and in the 
spring return again to the north. 
Their paths may be seen on the 
plains stretching away for hundreds 
of miles. As they are rather clumsy 
travellers it is hard for them to cross 
the mountains, and so they seek out 
the best routes ; and hunters and 
emigrants have found out that a 
buffalo track makes the surest and 
safest road for both men and 
horses. The best passes through 
the Cumberland and the Rocky 
Mountains were found by following 
these trails. 

Great numbers of buffaloes perish 
during these spring and autumn 
travellings. Many starve to death, 
and many get weak and are left be¬ 
hind and are eaten by wolves. 
Sometimes they try to cross a river 
on the ice, and when they are 
crowded together the ice gives way 
and hundreds are drowned. The 
Indians too and white hunters make 
great havoc among them, and thou¬ 
sands are killed by them for their 
skins alone, out of which buffalo 
robes for sleighs and carriages are 
made. Some Indian tribes live 
almost entirely on the buffalo : its 
flesh gives them food, its skin clothes 
them and covers their tents, and on 
the great prairies its dried dung is 
their only fuel. 

The buffalo runs with an awkward 
kind of gallop, but it takes a good 
horse and rider to keep up with it. 
Hunting it is a very exciting and 
sometimes a very dangerous sport, 
for it is not easily killed unless shot 
through the heart or some other 
vital part. When only wounded it 
becomes very savage and will turn 
and attack its hunters with great fury, 


and even a good horseman some¬ 
times finds it hard to keep out of its 
way. 

The buffalo is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia , or cud-chewing 
animals, and belongs to the family of 
the bovidcB. 

The word buffalo is from the 
Spanish bufalo , which comes from 
the Latin bubalus. 

BULLET, the ball fired from a gun, 
rifle, or pistol. Bullets are usually 
made of lead. In old times bullets 
were made by pouring melted lead 
into moulds, but they are now made 



A 



Rifle Bullets. 

a , Minid ; b, Enfield ; c, Springfield ; 
d, Explosive. 

by a machine which, can stamp out 
of solid lead six or seven thousand 
in an hour. Since the rifle has 
taken the place of the musket, bullets 
have been made long and sometimes 
sharp-pointed, and some have a hole 
in the back end with a plug fitted 
into it, which is driven in when the 
gun is fired and causes the lead to 
fill up the grooves or creases of the 
barrel. In the picture a is a Minie 
ball (named from its maker, a 
Frenchman) cut through the middle 
so as to show the hollow and the 














BUNTING 


93 


BUTTER 


plug, which is a little iron cup. The 
creases or grooves on the side are 
usually filled with tallow. In the 
Enfield bullet, b , the plug is a little 
piece of hard wood. The ball used 
in the United States Springfield rifle, 
shown in c, has no hollow in it. 
Sometimes bullets are made with a 
hollow place in their point, as in d, 
and filled with a kind of powder 
called percussion powder, which 
goes off when they strike any hard 
thing, and blows them to pieces. 

The word bullet is from the 
French boulet , a small form of boule , 
ball. 

BUNTING, a thin woollen stuff, 
from which flags are made. It is 
made of a fine hard-twisted worsted 
thread, and is much lighter and 
stronger for the purpose than any 
other kind of cloth would be. It is 
made in all colors, and in making a 
flag the different colors are sewn 
together. 

BUOY, a float chained to the bot¬ 
tom in harbors, rivers, etc., to show 
where the channel is, or to mark the 
place of rocks, shoals, or other things 
beneath the surface. Buoys are 
made of wood or iron usually, and 
are of different shapes and colors, so 
that they can easily be told from 
each other by sailors. Buoys made 
of wooden logs, chained so that they 
stand up in the water, are called spar 
buoys, and hollow ones of iron or 
other metal, can buoys. Bells are 
sometimes fastened to buoys, so that 
the waves will ring them ; and 
sometimes lanterns are hung on 
them. 

The word buoy is in Dutch boei, 
and in French bouee. 

BURDOCK, a common wild plant, 
found almost all over Europe and 
the United States. It grows about 
a yard high, has large coarse leaves, 
and a purplish flower. The little 
leaves around the flower-head have 
long sharp prickles, hooked at the 
point. By means of these the flower- 
heads, which are commonly called 
burs, catch on the clothes, the wool 


of sheep, the tails of animals, etc., 
and thus the seeds are scattered. 
In some countries the roots and the 
young shoots of burdock are used in 
soups. The leaves and their juice 
are good for putting on to burns, and 
on the skin when poisoned with 
poison ivy. 

BUTTER, the fatty part of MILK. 
Milk from which butter is to be made 
is set away in pans for about twenty- 
four hours, when the cream is care¬ 
fully skimmed off. Cream is made 
up of the little balls of fat with which 
milk is filled, each one being covered 
with a thin skin called albumen. 
All that is needed to make butter is 
to break the albumen skins and let 
the fat run together. This is usually 
done by churning—that is, by work¬ 
ing a wooden dasher through the 
cream until all the balls are broken. 
There are many kinds of churns, but 
the ones most in use are tall jars or 
casks in which the dasher works up 
and down, or boxes in which the 
dasher is turned round by means of a 
crank. Churning usually takes about 
three quarters of an hour. The but¬ 
ter forms first in kernels and then 
into a mass, leaving a thin liquid 
called buttermilk. When the butter 
is taken out of the churn it is care¬ 
fully washed in water, and then 
worked with the hand until all the 
buttermilk is got out, when salt is 
put in and it is made up into rolls for 
use. A little carrot juice or an- 
notto is sometimes added to give 
it a brighter color. 

Butter was but little known to the 
ancients. It is said to have been 
first found out by carrying milk in 
skin bottles on a camel. The butter 
was made by the jolting. It is still 
made in many parts of South Amer¬ 
ica by putting the cream into gourds 
or skin bags and slinging them across 
the back of a donkey, and then mak¬ 
ing the donkey trot round until the 
cream is churned. In Buenos Ayres 
a goat-skin bag full of cream is tied 
to one end of a long leather rope 
called a lasso, and the other end is 





BUTTERFLY 


94 


BUTTERFLY 


tied to the saddle of a horseman, who 
rides at a gallop, with the bag bump¬ 
ing and jumping along on the ground 
behind him, until it is churned to but¬ 
ter. In India a kind of butter called 
ghee is made from the milk of buffa¬ 
loes. 

The word butter is from the 
Anglo-Saxon butyre , which is from 
the Latin butyrum , Greek bouturon , 
butter. 

BUTTERFLY. Butterflies are the 
most beautiful of all insects. 
Though they are much like moths in 
shape, they are easily told from them 
by the knobs on the ends of their 
antennas or feelers, and by the 
greater brightness of their colors. 
They fly also only in the daytime, 



while moths fly by night. The 
greatest beauty of butterflies is in 
their wings, of which they have four, 
and which are colored on both sides, 
while in moths only the upper side is 
colored. Butterflies’ wings are sep¬ 
arate from each other, and they do 
not fold up when the insect rests, but 
stand straight up so that more of the 
under part can be seen than of the 
upper. The wings are covered with 
a kind of dust or powder, which, 
when looked at under the micro¬ 
scope, is seen to be made up of many 
beautiful scales or feathers, as per¬ 
fect as the coverings of fishes and of 
birds. They are so very small that 
it takes several hundred thousand of 
them to cover a square inch. 


Butterflies live mostly on the 
sweet juices of flowers, around 
which they may often be seen flutter¬ 
ing in the sunshine. They have a 
long hollow proboscis or tongue, 
which, when not in use, is coiled up 
under the head, as shown in the 
picture. When they wish to get the 
honey in the deep cup of a flower, 
they straighten this out, thrust it 
down into the flower, and suck the 
honey up through it. The two long 
things above the head are the 
antennae or feelers. 

Like most other insects, butter¬ 
flies pass through three different 
stages or changes of life. The 
female lays her EGGS on the leaves 
of such plants as the CATERPILLAR 
usually feeds on, and leaves them to 
be hatched by the heat of the sun. 
Those laid in summer are sometimes 
hatched in a few days, but in cool 
countries eggs laid in autumn are 
often not hatched until the next 
spring. The caterpillars hatched in 
spring live as caterpillars during the 
greater part of the summer, and 
those hatched in summer live through 
the winter as caterpillars. 

The picture shows the changes in 
life of a butterfly : a is the full-grown 
larva or caterpillar, the form in 
which it is hatched from the egg, b 
the change called the pupa or chrys¬ 
alis, and c the full-grown butterfly. 
This is a very beautiful kind of but¬ 
terfly, common in Europe, which is 
called the “ swallow-tail,” from the 
points on its tail. The caterpillar is 
green, with black rings dotted with 
red, and the wings of the butterfly 
are yellow, spotted and striped with 
black, with blue and red spots like 
eyes on the hinder wings. There 
are many kinds of swallow-tailed but¬ 
terflies in the United States, one of 
the finest of which is black, with two 
rows of yellow dots on its back ; on 
the wings are a broad band of yel¬ 
low spots near the edge, with a row 
of small yellow spots outside, and 
on each hinder wing are several blue 
spots between the rows and an orange 





BUTTERFLY 


95 


BUTTERNUT 


spot with a black centre which looks 
like an eye. The caterpillar is yel¬ 
low, striped and spotted with black. 
This butterfly is seen in New Eng¬ 
land and New York in June, when it 
lays its eggs, and from these a new 
brood of butterflies appear in Au¬ 
gust. 

Butterflies are found in all parts 
of the world, but the most kinds and 
the largest ones live in hot countries, 
where there are some which measure 
a foot across the wings. About 
five thousand kinds are known, of 
which nearly a thousand are in the 


United States. Though butterflies 
live only a short time, they some¬ 
times fly great distances, often in 
large flocks miles in width, and so 
long that they are many hours and 
even days in passing. Where they 
come from and where they go to are 
not known. In Australia there is 
one kind of butterfly used for food 
by the savages. They fly in such 
masses among the granite cliffs of 
the mountains that great numbers of 
them are killed by the smoke of fires 
which men build against the rocks. 
Bushels of them are collected and 



Changes of the Butterfly. 

a, Larva, or Caterpillar ; b, Pupa; c, Imago, or perfect Butterfly. 


baked ; the wings are picked off and 
the bodies made into cakes which 
look like lumps of fat. 

The butterfly belongs to the order 
lepidoptera, or scale-winged IN¬ 
SECTS. 

The word butterfly comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon buterfiege ; and the in¬ 
sect is so called from one of the 
common kinds, which looks like but¬ 
ter. 

BUTTERNUT, the fruit of the 
butternut or white walnut tree. 
The nuts are oblong, round at the 
base, and sharp at the point, and 


about two inches long. The inside 
or kernel is sweet and pleasant to the 
taste, but contains so much oil that 
it is apt to spoil. The shells and 
the bark of the tree make a good 
brown dye. 

Butternut wood is not so hard as 
that of the black walnut, but it is 
much used in making furniture as a 
contrast to it, as it is of a good 
yellow color and fine grain. Gun 
stocks are also sometimes made of 
it. The tree is quite common in the 
north parts of the United States and 
in Canada. 









BUTTON 


96 


BUZZARD 


The butternut gets its name from 
its richness. 

BUTTON, an article for fastening 
or ornamenting clothing. The prin¬ 
cipal kinds of buttons are : those 
with shanks or loops, those with 
holes, and covered buttons. In mak¬ 
ing shank buttons of metal, the but¬ 
ton and the shank are first made 
separately by machines, and then 
soldered together by hand. Some 
metal buttons are flat and some are 
hollow. The hollow ones are made 
of two separate disks or round 
pieces, both of which are stamped 
out by punching machines which 
make the raised pattern and letters 
on them. The shank is first fastened 
to the under piece, which is a little 
smaller than the upper one. The 
two pieces are then laid together and 
put under a machine which laps the 
edges of the larger piece all around 
the lower one and holds it tight. The 
buttons are then polished, and some¬ 
times silvered or gilded. 

Pearl, bone, and ivory buttons are 
often made with shanks. The disks 
are first cut out with a tubular saw, 
that is, a tube with ohe end made 
into saw teeth. The saw is made to 
turn round rapidly in a lathe and a 
thin sheet of pearl shell or bone is 
pressed against it until a round piece 
is cut out. After the edges have 
been smoothed, a hole is made half 
way through the under side, and then 
cut so as to make it larger at the 
bottom than at the top. The stem 
of the shank is made so that it will 
just go into the top of the hole, and 
then when struck with a hammer will 
spread out and fit tightly into the 
space at the bottom. Horn buttons 
also are sometimes made with shanks 
but the disks are not sawn out: the 
horn is first softened by heat and 
then cut into disks with round 
punches. 

Buttons with holes through them 
are made of many different mate¬ 
rials, such as pearl and other shells, 


bone, ivory, vegetable ivory, vari¬ 
ous kinds of hard wood, vulcan¬ 
ized india rubber, glass, porcelain, 
etc. The best shells for buttons are 
brought from Macassar in the East 
Indies, but many are got from the 
Red and the China seas, and from 
the coasts of the West Indies and 
Central America. Pearl buttons are 
cut out with a tubular or pipe-shaped 
saw, after which the holes are made. 
Buttons made of porcelain are 
pressed in moulds and baked. Many 
girls are employed in sewing buttons 
on to cards. 

Covered buttons are made by very 
ingenious machines, but the process 
would be too hard to describe. You 
can best understand how these but¬ 
tons are put together by taking one 
to pieces. The first covered buttons 
were made of wooden moulds over 
which the covering was sewed, but 
they are now made of iron moulds 
or shells, which are in parts, so that 
when they are stamped together in a 
die the covering is firmly fastened 
and a part of the lining is pressed up 
through a hole in the under disk to 
make a tuft to sew it on by. 

The word button is from the 
French bouton , a bud or button. 

BUZZARD. This bird belongs to 
the FALCON family, but it is heavier 
and slower in its flight than the true 
falcon. It is as large as the eagle 
and looks much like it. It does not 
fly very high, but sails along with a 
mournful cry, looking for prey, such 
as hares, squirrels, mice, frogs, 
lizards, and small birds, on which it 
chiefly feeds. When it sees any 
game it usually lights on a tree near 
it, and then swoops down quickly 
upon it. Farmers sometimes call it 
hen-hawk, because it visits poultry 
yards to steal chickens, but the hen 
hawk is another bird. The turkey 
buzzard is not really a buzzard, but a 
kind of vulture. 

The buzzard belongs to the order 
rapt ores, or birds of prey. 







c 


CABBAGE. Wild cabbages grow 
in many parts of Europe, but they 
have no heads ; the heads of our 
garden and field cabbages have been 
made by cultivation. Common cab¬ 
bages have white leaves inside the 
heads, but there is a kind called red 
cabbage, used mostly for pickling, 
which has deep red or purplish 
leaves. The cauliflower, broccoli, 
kale, and savoy belong to the same 
family with the cabbage. 

Although the cabbage is much 
eaten, it is not worth much for food, 
as more than nine-tenths of it is 
water. It is better to eat it raw than 
boiled. Raw cabbage eaten with 
vinegar digests in about two hours, 
while boiled cabbage takes four and 
a half hours. 

In the north of France and in the 
islands of the English Channel grows 
a kind of cabbage called the tree 
cabbage, because it branches out 
like a tree. It is often twice as tall 
as a man, and sometimes even taller 
than that. It does not head like our 
cabbages, and is raised chiefly for 
cattle, for which reason it is called 
by some the cow cabbage. Its stem, 
which grows very straight and hard, 
is made into canes, and is used for 
bean poles, and even for cross pieces 
for thatched roofs. Birds sometimes 
build their nests in the tops of these 
cabbages. 

The word cabbage is made from 
the old English cabes , and that from 
the Latin caput , head. 

CABLE, a large rope or chain, 
used chiefly for anchoring ships. 
Rope cables are not much used now 


for ships, as iron cables take up less 
room and are not so stiff. Iron 
chain cables are not exactly like com¬ 
mon chains, for each link has a bar, 
called a stay-piece, or stay-pin, 
across it, to strengthen it. The 
links are made 
out of rod iron 
of the right size, 
cut into pieces 
and welded to¬ 
gether—that is, Link of Chain Cable, 
hammered to¬ 
gether when white hot, at the ends, 
the stay-piece, which is of cast iron, 
being first put in place. The largest 
chain cable ever made was for the 
Great Eastern. The links are about 
as thick as a man’s wrist (2$- inches). 

The word cable is from the French 
cable , which is from the new Latin 
capium, a rope. 

CACAO. (See CHOCOLATE.) 

CACTUS, a kind of plant with 
thick fleshy stems, covered with 
spines or prickles, but no leaves. 
Cactuses grow in many different 
shapes : some are round like a mel¬ 
on, some tall like a column, some 
spread out in branches like a tree, 
and some have many thick leaf¬ 
shaped joints. Some creep on the 
ground like vines, and some grow five 
or six times as high as a man. They 
bear very beautiful flowers, from the 
purest white through the different 
shades of yellow to scarlet and deep 
purple. Among the cactuses the 
night blooming cereus is one of the 
most beautiful. It bears a splendid 
yellow flower, which opens in the 
evening and closes forever before 

97 





CALCIUM 


98 


CALICO 


morning. The prickly pear, which 
is grown for its fruit in Europe and 
America, is also a cactus ; and still 
another kind is the nopal, on which 
the cochineal insect feeds. The 
cactuses grow wild only in America. 

The word cactus is Latin, and is 
from the Greek kaktos. 

CALCIUM, a metal, and one of 
the principal elements. It is 
never found free—that is, alone by 
itself—but can be made by the chem¬ 
ist. When pure it is a bright, light 
yellow metal, nearly as hard as gold, 
and is easily hammered into thin 
leaves and drawn out into wire. In 
dry air it does not oxidize, or rust, 
but in moist air it unites with OXY¬ 
GEN quickly. Calcium is one of the 
most abundant things in the world, 
and forms part of some of the com¬ 
monest minerals. Quick lime, 
made up of calcium and oxygen, 
is calcium oxide ; limestone, mar¬ 
ble, CHALK, CORAL, SHELLS, etc., 
made up of calcium, carbon, and ox¬ 
ygen, are calcium carbonates ; gyp¬ 
sum, made up of calcium, sulphur, 
and oxygen, is calcium sulphate; 
and bone earth, made up of calcium, 
phosphorus, and oxygen, is calcium 
phosphate. 

What is called the calcium or 
Drummond light is made by put¬ 
ting a piece of lime or chalk, scraped 
down to a fine point, into the flame 
of the oxy-hydrogen BLOWPIPE. It 
will soon become white hot, and 
give out a light almost as bright as 
the sun. This light is much used in 
making signals, in lighting the fronts 
of theatres and other public build¬ 
ings, and for night meetings. It is 
called the Drummond light because 
Lieutenant Drummond, of the Brit¬ 
ish navy, first brought it into use. 

The word calcium is from the 
Latin calx, lime. 

CALICO, the name given in the 
United States to printed cotton 
cloths. In England common white 
cotton cloth is called calico ; when 
printed it is called printed calico, or 
more commonly printed muslin. 


Calicoes were at first printed from 
wooden blocks, and some are still 
made in this way. The pattern is 
engraved on large square blocks of 
pear, holly, or sycamore wood. 
The color to be used is thinly spread 
over a flat cushion or pad. The 
block, which is held by handles on 
the back, is laid face down on the 
pad so that it takes up some of the 
color. It is then laid down in the 
same way on the cotton cloth, which 
is spread on a flat table, and the 
color on the block is pressed on to 
the cloth so as to print the pattern. 
If there are more colors than one, 
there is one block for each color, and 
the blocks are used one after the 
other, each filling up its own place 
in the pattern. The cloth is passed 
on as fast as printed and a new part 
is brought on to the table for the 
blocks to be pressed upon. 

Calico printing is now mostly done 
by machines. The pattern is made 
on a roller, either of copper or brass, 
instead of on a flat block. The 
pattern is made on the roller in seve¬ 
ral ways. In one way a coating of 
varnish is put on the roller, and all 
the parts of the pattern are cut 
through it so that the copper can be 
seen. The roller is then put into 
weak NITRIC ACID, which eats out 
the copper in all the places where the 
varnish is cut through, but does not 
touch any of the parts covered by 
the varnish. Thus all the lines of 
the pattern are eaten into the surface 
of the roller. Another way of mak¬ 
ing the patterns on the rollers is by 
rolling over them a hard steel roller, 
on which the pattern is cut in relief 
—that is, the figures of the pattern 
are raised above the surface of the 
roller. By this means the raised fig¬ 
ures of the steel roller are pressed 
into the copper roller, and a perfect 
copy of them is made, only they are 
sunk in like those made by the acid, 
instead of raised as on the steel. 
(See Bank Note.) 

In a calico printing machine there 
are as many rollers as there are col- 




CALICO 


99 


CAMEL 


ors in the pattern, each roller having 
engraved upon it only that part of 
the pattern which is to print one 
color ; but all the parts are made so 
carefully that after each roller has 
rolled over the cloth all the colors 
printed fit together so as to make 
one pattern. In making some pat¬ 
terns as many as twenty printing rol¬ 
lers are used in one machine, but the 
usual number is from one to four. 
If the pattern has four colors in it, 
as red, green, yellow, and brown, 
there will be four printing rollers. 
The cloth, which is drawn along by 
the machinery, first passes under the 
red roller and has the red part of the 
pattern printed on it; it then passes 
under the green roller, which prints 
its part of the pattern near the red 
figures ; and the cloth then goes in 
turn under the yellow and brown 
rollers, each of which prints in its 
part. The machines work so per¬ 
fectly that one mile of calico can be 
printed with four colors in an hour. 
After it is printed the cloth goes over 
other rollers through a hot air cham¬ 
ber, which dries the colors. 

The mixing of the colors is one of 
the most important parts of calico 
printing, and needs a great deal of 
knowledge and skill. Vegetable, 
mineral, and animal colors are used, 
as in dyeing, but they are mixed in 
different ways. Some are thickened 
with starch or gum, so that they are 
more like a paint than a dye ; some 
have the mordant, or substance 
used to make the colors hold fast to 
the cloth, mixed with them ; some 
are used with liquids which would 
spoil others ; and some need to be 
steamed after they are printed. 
Each printing roller has a color roll¬ 
er which keeps turning over in a little 
trough filled with its own dye or 
color, and spreads the color evenly 
over its whole surface, filling up all 
the sunken lines of the pattern. If 
the cloth should now pass under the 
roller no pattern would appear ; but 
it would be printed all over one col¬ 
or. To prevent this a sharp metal 


blade, called the “ doctor,” is fixed 
close to each printing roller, which 
scrapes off all the color from its sur¬ 
face, leaving only that in the sunken 
lines of the pattern. 

After the printing and drying of 
the cloths, they have to be steamed, 
washed, starched, dried, marked, 
and packed in bales before they are 
ready for market. 

The word calico is made from 
Calicut, a seaport of India, on the 
Malabar coast, from which calicoes 
were first brought. 

CALOMEL. See Mercury. 

CAMBRIC, the finest and thinnest 
kind of linen cloth. It is soft and 
silky, and has a beautiful gloss. 
The best is made in France and 
Switzerland. A thin delicate kind 
of cambric is called lawn. 

A fine muslin, or cotton cloth, 
made to look like cambric, is also 
called by its name. Scotch cambric 
is also a muslin, but sometimes has 
a little flax mixed with the cotton. 

The word cambric is made from 
Cambrai, France, where it was first 
made. Lawn is from the French 
linon , which is from the Latin linum , 
flax. 

CAMEL. There are two kinds of 
camels, the Bactrian, found in Cen¬ 
tral Asia, which has two humps on 
its back, and the Arabian, found 
mostly in Arabia, Syria, and North¬ 
ern Africa, which has but one hump. 
The Arabian camel is sometimes 
wrongly called the dromedary, but 
the dromedary is only a variety of it, 
more slender and swifter than the 
common kind, and differs from it 
only in the same way that the race 
horse differs from the common horse. 
The dromedary is very fleet and will 
carry a rider more than a hundred 
miles in a day ; but the camel is 
much slower, and seldom travels 
faster than about two and a half 
miles an hour. 

The camel is ugly-looking, but it is 
one of the most useful of animals. 
Without it the great deserts would 
be impassable. Its wide clumsy-look- 




CAMEL 


ioo 


CANAL 


ing feet do not sink into the sand, 
and their thick soles protect them 
from its burning heat. Its eyes are 
fitted with long lashes which save 
them from the sun’s rays, and it can 
close its nostrils at will when the 
sharp sand is driven by the wind. 
Its teeth are formed for chewing the 
wiry grass and thistles of the desert, 
and its stomach for digesting them. 
The camel can live on but little food, 
for its hump is a storehouse of fat, 
from which its body is supplied when 
it crosses the long deserts. The 
Arab always looks at his camel’s 
hump before starting on a journey, to 
see if it is in good condition. When 
it is thin and poor, the animal is giv¬ 
en rest and plenty of food until it 
grows again. The camel’s stomach 
is also so formed that it can carry 
enough water to last it a week; and 
sometimes when the water of a 
caravan gives out, some of the 
camels are killed to get this supply. 
An Arab seldom kills a camel for 
food, but when one is killed all the 
people of the tribe share the feast. 
The flesh is eaten both roast and 
boiled. 

In the beginning of summer the 
long woolly hair of the camel be¬ 
comes loose and is easily pulled away 
from the skin. Out of it the Arab 
weaves several kinds of cloth, some 
of which he uses for clothing, and a 
coarser kind as a covering for his 
tent. Some camels’ hair is also sent 
from Persia to Europe, where it is 
made into camels’ hair pencils or 
brushes for painters. Good leather 
is made from the skin of the camel, 
and in the desert its dung is very 
useful for fuel. Most of the cloths 
called “camels’ hair’’ are made out 
of wool. Camels’ hair shawls are 
made from the wool of the Cash- 
mere goat. 

The camel is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia, or cud-chewing 
animals. 

The word camel is from the Latin 
camelus, which is from the Arabic 
gamal , 


CAMPHOR, the gum of several 
kinds of the laurel or bay tree. Cam¬ 
phor is gotten chiefly in Japan, For¬ 
mosa, Sumatra, and Borneo. Almost 
all which comes to this country is 
brought from Japan and Formosa. 
The tree is cut up into small pieces 
and heated with a little water in large 
iron kettles, which are fitted with 
round covers filled with straw. The 
steam rises and wets the straw, and 
when it cools the camphor is left in 
the straw in small grains. The cam- 
hor of commerce is very impure and 
as to be refined before it is fit for 
use. The liquid called spirits of 
camphor is made by putting gum 
camphor into alcohol. 

Sumatra and Borneo camphor, 
sometimes called hard camphor, is 
bought by the Chinese, who believe 
it to be better than other kinds, and 
pay very large prices for it. It 
comes from a tree which grows twice 
as high as a city house, and is as 
thick as the height of a tall man. 
The tree is cut down and split up, 
and the camphor is found in hard 
pieces in hollow places ia the wood. 
Camphor wood trunks are supposed 
to be made of this tree. 

The word camphor is from the 
Greek kamphora. The Malays call 
it kaphur. 

CANAL, a water channel made by 
art. In ancient times canals were 
used mostly for supplying water to 
the fields in countries where rain was 
scarce, but some were made for 
boats. They were generally on a 
level, or with a slight fall so that the 
water would run easily through them. 
They could be used, therefore, only 
in level countries; but in the fifteenth 
century, when canal locks were first 
made, it was found out how canals 
could be made of use in countries 
where the surface was uneven. 

Canals are now usually built in 
several parts called levels, each level 
having its water higher or lower than 
the one next to it. In hilly districts 
these levels are so many and so near 
to each other that they look like a 




CANAL 


IOI 


CANARY BIRD 


flight of steps. Every two levels 
are separated by a lock. A lock is a 
chamber or box, usually made of 
stonework, as in the picture, but 
sometimes of wood, and large enough 
to hold a canal boat. It has a gate 
at each end, one, a, opening into 
the upper level, and the other, b, into 
the lower level of the canal. These 
gates are in two parts, and open in 
the middle against the current or 
flow of the water. When a boat is 
going up the canal, it passes into 
the chamber of the lock through the 
lower gate, b, which is then closed. 
Water is now let into the chamber 
through openings in the upper gate, 
a, until the water in it is on a level 
with that in the upper level. The 
upper gate is then opened, and the 


boat, which has risen with the water 
in the lock, passes out into the upper 
level. If another boat is now to 
pass down, it goes into the lock, the 
upper gate is closed, and the water 
is let out through holes in the lower 
gate until the water in the lock is 
lowered to the level below, when the 
lower gate is opened, and the boat 
passes out. On some canals boats 
are carried from one level to another 
on railways, instead of through locks; 
and on others they are raised and 
lowered by powerful machinery. 

Canals are often carried over riv¬ 
ers whose waters are at a lower 
level, or across valleys or other nat¬ 
ural low places, on great bridges 
called aqueducts. The most re¬ 
markable canal aqueducts in the 



Canal Lock. 


United States are those which cross 
the Genesee and Seneca rivers on 
the Erie Canal, and that which car¬ 
ries the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal 
over the Potomac river. 

In China canal boats are usually 
dragged by men by means of long 
ropes ; in Europe and the United 
States by horses and mules. Steam 
is now used successfully on many 
of the larger canals, particularly in 
Europe and on the great Suez Canal. 

The word canal is from the Latin 
canalis, a pipe, which comes from 
canna, a reed. 

CANARY BIRD. This bird got 
its name from the Canary Islands, 
from which the first were carried to 
Europe ; but some say it belongs 
in Africa, and that the first ones in 


the Canary Islands were tame ones 
which escaped from a ship. But 
there are now plenty of wild ones in 
Madeira and the Canary and Cape 
Verde Islands. They are smaller 
than our tame ones and of duller 
plumage, being usually of a dusky 
gray or greenish yellow. When 
these birds were carried to Europe 
they became mixed with other birds, 
and there are now about fifty dif¬ 
ferent kinds of canaries. Some of 
these are different in form from the 
common canary. The ‘ ‘ Manchester 
coppy,” named from Manchester, 
England, has a flat head; the 
“ Norwich buff-crested,” named 
from Norwich, has a topknot; and 
the “ Belgian” is so slender that it 
can almost go through a finger ring. 











CANARY BIRD 


102 


CANARY BIRD 


Great numbers are raised in Ger¬ 
many, and thousands are brought 
from there to this country every year. 
But a good many are also raised 
here. 

The canary lays four to six pale 
blue eggs and hatches five and some¬ 
times six times in a season. The 
hen usually begins to lay in April. 
She sits thirteen days, during which 
her mate waits on her with great 
care and attention. The wild canary 
builds its nest in thick shrubs and 
trees, with moss, feathers, and hair. 
Soft straws, threads, hairs, etc., 
should be given to the tame canary, 
and she will build her nest in her 
cage. She knows how to do this 
better than you can tell her. A lady 
once thought she would save her 
bird the trouble of building a nest, 
and made what she thought was a 
very nice one and put it into the 
cage ; but the bird did not like her 
work at all, and tore the nest to 
pieces with its beak. It then built 
it over again to suit itself. 

The hen canary will sometimes 
eat her own eggs. The best way to 
prevent this is to put her food in the 
cage over night, for after laying her 
egg in the morning she usually looks 
for her breakfast, and if she does not 
find it she may break all the eggs in 
her nest. If she does this when she 
has food enough before her, she is 
not worth much. When the little 
ones are hatched the best food for 
them is hard-boiled egg mixed with 
a little wheat bread. Cut the egg up 
fine and add to it part of a roll which 
has been soaked in water a few min¬ 
utes and then squeezed dry. A 
tablespoonful of this food will be 
enough, and great care must be 
taken to have it fresh, for if it is the 
least sour it may kill the young 
birds. The little ones are always 
fed by the male bird. In about two 
weeks they will be able to feed them¬ 
selves, and when they are a month 
old they may be put into a cage by 
themselves. Up to this time they 
should be fed on egg and bread only, 


and this soft food should be kept 
mixed with the common food of old 
birds for four or five weeks longer, 
when the young ones may be treated 
like grown-up birds. 

Canaries should have plenty of 
light and fresh air, and should be 
kept in rooms of an even heat: if 
they are too cool they are apt to be¬ 
come sick, and if too warm they will 
shed their feathers too soon. The 
cage should be kept very clean, and 
a dish of fresh water should be put 
into it every day for the birds to 
wash in. It is well to scatter some 
dry sand over the bottom of the cage. 
The favorite food of canaries is 
canary seed, or the seed of canary 
grass, with which a little rape, hemp, 
millet, linseed, and poppy seed may 
sometimes be added for a change. 
In warm weather give them plenty 
of chickweed, and now and then a 
leaf of watercress or lettuce. A little 
lettuce and a slice of sweet apple 
may also be given sometimes in win¬ 
ter, but not too often. When a bird 
is breeding or moping the yolk of a 
hard-boiled egg may be given, but 
as a general thing plain food is the 
best. Never offer canaries sweet 
cake or rich food ; most of their dis¬ 
eases are caused by over-feeding. 

Be careful about letting them out of 
the cage, and especially in rooms 
where there is a fire, as they are apt 
to fly toward a bright light. It is a 
cruelty to let a canary bird escape 
into the open air, as it does not know 
how to look for food, and will soon 
die of hunger. But some have been 
taught to go out and come back again 
to their cage. An English gentle¬ 
man had a canary which was never 
kept in a cage, but went wherever it 
pleased. In summer it would fly out 
of doors, and would always go down 
to the gate to meet its master, 
perching on his finger or nestling in 
his hair. It got lost, however, on a 
very foggy day, and was never seen 
again. A canary bird in France be¬ 
came a great friend of a large dog, 
and took much delight in playing 





CANDLE 


103 


CANDLE 


with it. Sometimes the dog would 
open his mouth wide, and the little 
bird would hop in there and sit with¬ 
out any fear. Cats are enemies of 
birds, and many a poor canary has 
been killed and eaten by them ; but 
there was once in London a cat and 
her kittens who became so much 
attached to a canary that they would 
let it eat out of the same dish with 
them without harming it. 

Canaries may be taught with care 
and patience to do a good many 
amusing tricks. The Germans teach 
them to sing tunes and the songs of 
other birds, but it is very slow and 
tedious work. 

The canary belongs to the order 
insessores , or perching BIRDS, and 
to the finch family, which includes 
also the larks, sparrows, and lin¬ 
nets. 

CANDLE. The ancients had no 
candles like ours. The Greeks and 
Romans sometimes used strips of a 
kind of paper called papyrus, soaked 
in pitch and covered with wax, but 
they depended for light mostly on 
oil lamps. In England in early times 
splinters of wood and the pith of 
rushes dipped in tallow were the 
only candles. 

Candles are now made of tallow, 
wax, spermaceti, stearine, paraffine, 
and some kinds of oils. Tallow 
candles are usually made of a mix¬ 
ture of mutton and beef tallow, and 
wax candles of beeswax. Sperma¬ 
ceti is obtained from the head of the 
sperm whale. There is a hollow in 
the front of the skull called the 
case, in which there is sometimes 
three or four hundred gallons of a 
yellow mixture of spermaceti and 
oil. When the oil is separated the 
spermaceti looks like a beautiful 
pearl-white wax. Stearine candles 
are made from tallow so purified of 
its oleine or oily matter, that only 
the solid white part is left. When 
pure, stearine looks like white wax, 
and has no taste nor smell. Paraf¬ 
fine is a substance something like 
spermaceti, made from peat, coal 


tar, bituminous coal, and other 
things. Candles made of it are 
almost as good as those of wax and 
spermaceti. Palm and cocoanut oils 
are also good for making candles. 

Candles are usually made in one 
of three ways : by dipping, mould¬ 
ing, and rolling. Dipped candles 
are made of the coarsest kinds of 
tallow. Wicks of cotton yarn, 
hung side by side on a stick, are 
dipped many times into melted tallow 
and allowed to harden each time un¬ 
til the candles are large enough. 
Mould candles are made by pouring 
melted tallow into tin, pewter, or 
glass moulds, each of which is 
shaped like a candle and has a wick 
stretched through the middle. As 
the moulds are larger at the bottom 
than at the top, the candles are easily 
drawn out when cold. Stearine, 
paraffine, and palm oil candles are 
also made in moulds. Wax candles 
are not made in moulds, because 
wax shrinks much in cooling, and is 
also apt to stick to the mould. The 
wicks are dipped into melted wax, 
and then rolled into shape while 
warm on a hard wood or stone table 
by means of a boxwood roller, which 
is wetted with water to keep the wax 
from sticking to it. Wax candles 
are sometimes shaped by drawing 
them through holes in a machine, 
just as wire is drawn. Both wax 
and spermaceti candles are often 
made of different colors. 

In China grows a tree called the 
tallow tree, from which the Chinese 
make candles. The tallow comes 
from the seeds, which are pounded 
and boiled in water, when the fat 
rises on the top. This is skimmed 
off, and when cold is as white as 
snow and almost as soft. When the 
Chinese make candles out of it, they 
mix wax enough with it to harden 
it. They are said to give a bright, 
clear light. The tallow tree has been 
planted in Georgia, South Carolina, 
and Florida, and many are now 
growing in those States, but no use 
is made of them. 




CANDY 


104 


CANDY 


But the most curious kind of can¬ 
dle is that made out of a fish by the 
Indians on the Pacific coast of Brit¬ 
ish Columbia. This little fish, called 
the enlachon, or candle-fish, is about 
a foot long, and looks much like a 
SMELT. It is one of the fattest of all 
fishes, and when dried will burn 
with a bright flame till burned up. 
The Indians sometimes burn it 
alone, lighting it at the tail, and some¬ 
times run a wick of woody threads 
through it. They also dry and 
smoke this fish for winter food, and 
use the oil for butter. 

The word candle is from the 
Anglo-Saxon candel , Latin candela , 
a candle, from candere , to shine. 

CANDY. To make candy one 
must know all about boiling sugar, 
as some kinds do not need so much 
boiling as others. If some crushed 
sugar be heated, with a little water, 
the lumps will first soften and break 
up and then melt into a clear liquid. 
If this be boiled, a good deal of the 
water will pass off as steam and the 
liquid will become thicker. By set¬ 
ting this aside and letting it cool 
slowly, the sugar will form in large 
clear crystals on the sides and bot¬ 
tom of the kettle. This is what is 
commonly called rock-candy. If, in¬ 
stead of allowing it to cool, the liquid 
be boiled still more, most of the 
water will pass off in steam, and the 
sugar will form in grains around the 
kettle ; but if it be made still hotter the 
sugar grains will melt and the whole 
will become a thick, clear, paste-like 
syrup. If a spoon be dipped into 
this and drawn out, a long thread 
of melted sugar will follow it ; and 
if a little of it be dropped into cold 
water it will become hard and brit¬ 
tle. Most candies are made from 
sugar in this state. If the syrup be 
heated still more it will froth and 
become dark brown, and turn into 
what is called caramel. 

There are eight or nine different 
degrees or stages in boiling sugar, 
for each of which the confectioners 
have a name. Besides sugar, there 


are many other things used in mak¬ 
ing candy, particularly for flavor¬ 
ing, such as the syrups and juices 
of fruits, berries, nuts, and seeds. 
Several kinds of liqueurs or cordials, 
acids, and gums are also used, and 
many different coloring extracts. 
Some of the colors used by confec¬ 
tioners are poisonous, and children 
have been made very sick from eat¬ 
ing candies colored with them. The 
most dangerous colors are yellow and 
orange, which are often made with 
chromate of lead. Bright red candy 
is sometimes colored with vermilion, 
made from mercury, and green 
candy with verditer and Brunswick 
green, made from COPPER, all of 
which are poisonous. In buying 
candy it is best to pick out those 
kinds which are not brightly colored. 
But even white candies, especially 
cheap kinds, are not always safe, 
for they are usually mixed with 
chalk, plaster of Paris (see gypsum), 
pipe clay, and starch. Although 
these things are not really poisonous, 
they are not healthful to eat, and 
often lead to illness. Instead of 
cane sugar confectioners make large 
use of grape sugar made from 
starch, and many use a thick syrup 
made from the starch of Indian com. 
The making of candy takes a great 
deal of care and skill, and only the 
best workmen can make all the 
kinds. The French workmen are 
the most skilful. 

We can tell here only about a 
few of the common sorts of candy. 
Sugar Plums, which are called com¬ 
fits in England, are made of almonds 
or some other nut, or of some small 
seeds like caraway seeds, coated 
with sugar. The almonds or seeds 
are thrown into a copper pan with a 
paste of sugar, syrup, and starch. 
The pan is hung over a fire and is 
kept moving all the time so that the 
almonds are kept rolling over each 
other. They thus become coated 
with the paste, which thickens as 
it dries, and the pan is kept in 
motion until they are of the right 





CANDY 


105 


CANNON 


size. Sugar plums can be made of 
only one color at a time. 

Gum Drops are made of GUM 
Arabic and sugar, but sometimes 
Barbary gum and gum Senegal are 
used. The mixture, which is made 
about as thick as honey, is flavored 
and colored to suit the taste. When 
it is ready a shallow box is filled 
with fine starch, the top of the 
starch is smoothed over, and little 
hollow places of the size and shape 
of the gum drops are made in it. 
The mixture is then poured into these 
little moulds, just enough being 
put into each to make one gum 
drop. The mould is then set away 
in a warm place to dry for several 
days, until the drops are hard 
enough to handle. 

Bonbons with liqueurs in them are 
made in a similar way. A thick 
syrup of sugar and water has some 


kind of liquor added to it, and it is 
then poured into little moulds, of the 
right size and shape, made in fine 
starch. The syrup draws up into a 
round form, just as a drop of water 
would in dry flour ; a little starch is 
sifted over the top, and the whole is 
set aside to dry. The sugar on the 
outside soon crystallizes and forms a 
crust around the bonbon, and as it 
dries the syrup on the inside adds 
more and more of its sugar to the 
crust, and thus becomes thin. 

Lozenges are made of sugar fla¬ 
vored with peppermint or other 
essences, worked up into a dough, 
and rolled out flat and thin. It is 
then stamped with various mottoes 
and cut out by punches into the 
shapes wanted. 

The word candy is from the 
Turkish cartel , sugar. 

CANNON. The parts of a can- 





/ 





A 

of 

l-l 


u 


Fig. 1.—Parts of a Cannon. 


non are shown in the picture, Fig. 1, 
which is that of a heavy gun of the 
common kind for seacoast defence. 
In this, A is the breech, B the first 
re-enforce, C the second re-enforce, 
D the chase, and E the muzzle ; F 
F are the trunnions, and H is the 
bore. Such a cannon is used mostly 
in forts, and is generally fixed upon 
a heavy frame, called a carriage, 
which moves on small iron wheels, 
and which is so made that the 
muzzle of the gun can be easily 
raised or lowered. Cannon of this 
shape are not often made now, but 
the same parts in any large gun are 
called by the same names. 

It is not known when cannon 
were first made, but they came into 
use soon after gunpowder was found 
out. The earliest ones, called bom¬ 


bards, one of which is shown in 
Fig. 2, were short and clumsy, wider 
at the mouth than at the breech, 
and were made of iron bars bound 
together with hoops of iron. Stone 
balls were fired from them, but they 



Fig. 2.—Bombard. 


soon gave place to iron ones. Can¬ 
non were next made of wrought 
or hammered iron, and afterward 
of different kinds of cast metals. 
Breech-loading guns, or those load¬ 
ing at the back end, were made very 




















CANNON 


106 


CANNON 


early, but they soon went out of use 
because no one then knew how to 
make them strong enough. Can¬ 
non called culverins were sometimes 
made more than four times as long 
as a man, because the early artil¬ 
lerists believed that the longer the 
gun was the farther it would shoot. 


A picture of a culverin is given in 
Fig. 3 - , 

In later times cannon have had a 
great many different names, such as 
carronade, howitzer, shell gun, 
mortar, etc. Carronades were 
named after the Carron iron works 
in Scotland, where they were first 



Fig. 3--' 

made. They are short iron guns 
for shooting a large ball, and were 
once much used in close naval battles 
to smash in the sides of ships; 
whence sailors called them smash¬ 
ers. Howitzers are light, short 
guns, used in battles on land to 
throw shells into the enemy’s ranks 
at short distances. Mortars are so 
called because they are shaped like 
an apothecary’s mortar. They are 
very short, with a large bore, and are 
used to throw bombs or shells into 
the air so that they will fall into 
fortified places. They are usually 


Culverin. 

mounted on an iron carriage, like 
that shown in Fig. 4. Shell guns 
are long cannon used for shooting 
shells (see Shot and Shell) straight 
at an object. They are like howitz¬ 
ers in shape, but much longer. 

The invention of rifle cannon has 
caused most of the old kinds of 
guns, all of which had a smooth bore 
or inside, to go out of use. (See 
Rifle.) Rifle cannon may be made 
to load at the muzzle or the breech. 

Cannon are now made of cast 
iron, wrought iron, cast steel, and 
bronze or brass. Bronze for gun 



Fig. 4.—Mortar. 


metal is made of nine parts of cop¬ 
per and one part of tin. Guns are 
usually cast solid and bored out 
afterward, but some are now cast 
hollow. Wrought IRON guns are 
made by welding or hammering to¬ 


gether rings or strips of red-hot iron 
around a mandrel or bar of metal, 
which is afterward bored out. 

Of late years heavy cannon have 
been made of a great many different 
shapes. One of the largest kinds 









































































CANNON 


107 


CANNON 


now used in the forts of the United 
States is the Rodman gun (named 
after Gen. Rodman), which is shown 
mounted on its carriage in Fig. 5. 
Some of these guns are so large that 
they will carry a ball nearly as large 
round as a barrel (20 inches wide). 


Cannon for use in the field are 
mounted on gun carriages, which 
are drawn by horses. The usual 
form of the carriage is shown in 
Fig. 6. In this the part of the car¬ 
riage marked A is called the stock, 
B the cheek, C the screw by which 



Fig. 5.—Rodman Gun. 


the end of the gun can be raised or 
lowered, and D the trail. Such a 
gun is said to be unlimbered, be¬ 
cause the stock is unfastened from 
the limber and let down on the 
ground, ready to be fired. The lim¬ 
ber is the fore part of a gun-carriage, 
or the part to which the horses are 
hitched. It is made up of two 
wheels and an axle, on which is an 
iron box for carrying powder and 


other things for loading the gun. 
The cannoneers ride on seats on the 
top of this box, but some of the men 
ride on the horses. When the can¬ 
non is to be moved from one place 
to another, the stock is raised up 
from the ground, and the trail (D) 
is fastened to the limber. The men 
then spring into their places on the 
horses and on the limber, and the 
horses are driven off at a gallop. 



The Gatling gun is mounted on a 
carriage much like the field gun. 
It is made up of ten small barrels, 
somewhat larger than common gun- 
barrels, so put together that they 
all turn round when a handle near 
the breech is turned. As each bar¬ 


rel comes to a certain place, a cart¬ 
ridge is pushed into it by the machine 
and fired. As the handle can be 
turned very fast, as many as four 
hundred shots can be fired in a min¬ 
ute. This kind of gun is very useful 
in defending forts, especially against 








































CANVAS 


108 


CARBON 


night attacks by large bodies of men, 
and for clearing bridges and streets 
both in time of war and in riots. 

The word cannon is from the 
Italian cannone, which is from the 
Latin canna , a hollow reed. 

CANVAS, a coarse kind of cloth, 
usually made of flax or hemp. 
Artists’ canvas is the material on 
which most oil paintings are made. 
Before using it is usually primed, 
or covered with a preparation of 
chalk and size or of white lead, which 
when dry is ground until its surface 
is smooth. It is also generally 
stretched on wooden frames of the 
size of the picture. A light kind of 
canvas, made with open threads, is 
much used by ladies for embroider¬ 
ing. Canvas for the sails of ships is 
commonly called sail cloth. It is 
made of flax, of cotton, or of cotton 
and flax mixed, and is carefully and 
strongly woven. It is usually very 
narrow, so that many widths are sewn 
together in making a sail. A kind 
of coarse, light canvas, used for 
small sails, is called duck (German 
tuck, cloth). 

Other kinds of canvas are used for 
tents, awnings, etc. 

The word canvas is from the Latin 
cannabis , hemp. 

CAPER, the pickled flower bud of 
the caper shrub. The caper is a low 
trailing shrub common in the south 
of Europe. It is largely cultivated 
in France, Italy, and Sicily. The 
buds are picked every morning in 
the season, which lasts from May to 
November, and put into vinegar and 
salt. They are used chiefly in mak¬ 
ing sauces. 

The word caper is from the Latin 
capparis. 

CAPSTAN, a machine on a ship, 
used to heave the anchor, to hoist 
heavy weights, etc. It consists of a 
barrel made of heavy timber, around 
which a rope or chain coils, and 
which turns round on a pivot work¬ 
ing in the deck under it ; the drum¬ 
head, a round flat head of timber, j 
with holes round its edge for the 1 


capstan bars to fit in ; the pawls, or 
rachets to keep the capstan from 
turning backward ; and the bars, or 
levers to work the capstan with. 

The sailors put the bars into the 
square holes of the drum-head and 



Capstan. 


turn it round, thus winding up the 
rope or chain around the barrel and 
raising the anchor or other weight. 

The word capstan is from the 
French cabestan, a capstan. 

CARAWAY, the seed of a small 
plant which grows wild in Europe. 
It is much cultivated in Germany 
and England. The roots are some¬ 
thing like the parsnip, and are eaten 
in the north of Europe. The seeds 
are used as a medicine, and to flavor 
liquors, confectionery, cakes, bread, 
etc. The liqueur called Kiimmel, 
much used in Germany and Rus¬ 
sia, is made by distilling caraway 
seeds in spirit. Oil of caraway is 
made by distilling (see Alcohol) 
the seeds with water. 

The word caraway is from the 
Latin careum , some think from 
Caria, in Asia Minor. 

CARBON, one of the ELEMENTS 
and one of the most common and 
most important substances in na¬ 
ture. It forms a large part of all 
vegetables and animals, and of many 
minerals, such as coal, graphite, 
asphaltum, limestone, chalk, and 
marble. The DIAMOND is pure car¬ 
bon in the form of crystal. Anthra¬ 
cite COAL and BLACK LEAD or graph¬ 
ite are nearly pure forms of car¬ 
bon, but uncrystallized. Charcoal, 
coke, and LAMPBLACK are also 
carbon, but more or less impure. 






CARBONIC ACID 


109 


CARD 


Carbon takes many forms when 
mixed with other substances. With 
oxygen it forms carbonic acid, 
without which plants could not live 
(see Air). Carbonic acid, united 
with metals, earths, and alkalies, 
produces what are called the carbon¬ 
ates, which are so useful in the arts. 
Chalk, marble, and limestone, for 
instance, are carbonates of CAL¬ 
CIUM, made by uniting different parts 
of carbonic acid with the metal cal¬ 
cium. Common GAS, which is 
burned for lights, is formed of car¬ 
bon and hydrogen. Wood, gum, 
starch, sugar, oil, gelatine, and many 
other things are made up of carbon, 
united with hydrogen and oxygen. 

The word carbon is from the Latin 
carbo y coal. 

CARBONIC ACID, a compound 
substance formed by the union of 
one part of carbon with two parts 
of OXYGEN. There is some of it in 
the AIR, but only a very small quan¬ 
tity compared with oxygen and nitro¬ 
gen, there being but about one gal¬ 
lon of it in every 2500 gallons of air. 
In places around volcanoes it is more 
plentiful, and it forms a large part 
of some minerals, such as chalk, 
marble, and limestone. 

In its usual form carbonic acid is 
a colorless gas, with a slightly acid 
smell and taste. It is half again as 
heavy as air, and often settles at the 
bottom of mines, pits, and wells. 
Nothing will burn in this gas, and 
no animal can live in it. Men who 
go down into places where it has 
settled are sometimes overcome by 
it and die before they can receive 
aid. It is always safer to let down 
a candle where it is supposed to be : 
if the gas is there the candle will go 
out ; but if the candle burns brightly 
the air is good enough to breathe. 
Carbonic acid is deadly because it 
acts like a poison when breathed into 
the lungs. In this it differs from 
NITROGEN, in which animals die not 
because it is poison, but because 
they are shut out from oxygen. The 
carbonic acid in the air does not in¬ 


jure us, because there is so little of 
it, and because the air keeps always 
in motion so that the gases of which 
it is made are kept well shaken up 
together. If the air were still all the 
time, the carbonic acid, which is so 
much heavier than the other gases, 
would settle in the valleys and other 
low places on the earth, and men 
and animals could live only on the 
mountains. 

Though carbonic acid is a poison 
when breathed into the lungs, it is 
harmless and even healthful when 
taken into the stomach. It will dis¬ 
solve or melt in water, but when put 
under strong pressure it will dissolve 
much more freely than when under 
only the common pressure of the air. 
Water thus charged or filled with it 
has a pleasant, brisk, acid taste, and 
effervesces or bubbles up when the 
pressure is taken off, as when it flows 
out into the air. Mineral water, 
which comes out of the earth in 
many places, is natural carbonic acid 
water, and what is wrongly called 
SODA water is the same made 
artificially or by hand. When soda 
water is drawn from the fountain the 
pressure is taken off and the car¬ 
bonic acid gas bubbles up and makes 
it foam. The same gas makes 
cider, porter, and champagne fizz 
when their corks are drawn and they 
are poured out. 

Carbonic acid gas will turn into a 
liquid if it be put under great pres¬ 
sure ; and if the liquid be exposed to 
cold it will become a solid white 
mass which may be made into a ball 
like snow. 

CARD. Cards, whether visiting, 
business, or playing cards, are first 
made in sheets and then cut up into 
the sizes wanted. The sheets, which 
are called cardboard, are made in 
two ways : common cardboard is 
made of pulp on the paper machine ; 
but the finer kinds are composed of 
several sheets of paper pasted to¬ 
gether. Most playing cards and 
Bristol board are thus pasted. 
Bristol board (named from Bristol, 





CARDAMOM 


no 


CARPET 


England, where it was first made), 
which is used by artists and for the 
finest visiting cards, is made entirely 
of sheets of white paper, but com¬ 
mon cardboard and the board from 
which playing cards are cut have fine 
paper on the outside only, the inside 
being made of one or more sheets of 
cheap cartridge paper. 

In making cardboard for playing 
cards, the first sheet, on which has 
been printed the design for the back 
of the cards, is laid down on a table 
and the white side of it is brushed 
over with paste. A sheet of car¬ 
tridge paper is next laid on it, and 
the workman brushes this also with 
paste and lays on it the sheet which 
is to make the face of the card. This 
forms one sheet of cardboard. He 
now lays another back sheet on this 
face sheet, and makes another card¬ 
board, and so on until he has a 
large pile, which is put into a press 
where all the water is squeezed out 
of the paste. The sheets are then 
separated and dried for a day in a 
heated room. They are now rough 
and warped, but they are flattened 
and made smooth by passing them 
between smooth steel rollers and 
afterward pressing them very hard 
in a press where every sheet of card¬ 
board is placed between two sheets 
of smooth zinc. If they are to be 
enamelled, they are brushed over 
with a mixture of China clay or white 
lead and water with a little glue in 
it ; when dry, this is rubbed over 
with a piece of flannel dipped in 
powdered soapstone, and afterward 
polished with a brush. 

The faces of playing cards are 
printed from blocks, much like those 
used in CALICO printing, there being 
one block for each color. A whole 
pack of cards is printed on one sheet 
of paper, so that each card shall be 
of exactly the same thickness. 

The word card is from the Latin 
charta, a sheet of paper. 

CARDAMOM, the seeds of a plant 
which grows in India. They come 
in a three-cornered pod, about half 


an inch long, and of the color of an 
orange seed. The seeds, which are 
about as large as mustard seeds, are 
reddish brown on the outside and 
white within, and have a pleasant 
smell and taste. They are used as 
a medicine and as a flavor. In In¬ 
dia they are put into soups, catsups, 
and curries. 

The word cardamom comes from 
the Latin carda 7 nomum. 

CARP, a kind of fish of the same 
family with the SUCKER and the 
goldfish. The common carp is a 
European fish, but has been put into 
the Hudson and some other north¬ 
ern rivers of the United States. 
Carp weigh usually one to fifteen 
pounds, and are very good eating. 
They like quiet waters, with soft 
muddy bottoms, and will bite at a 
worm, a light-colored one being bet¬ 
ter than an angle worm, but they are 
shy fish and do not give much sport 
to the angler. 

The word carp is from the French 
carpe , which is probably from the 
Latin carpere , to seize. 

CARNELIAN. See Agate. 

CARPET. To understand the 
terms used in this article, the article 
Cloth should be read first. Some 
of the best carpets take their names 
from the places where they were first 
made : Turkey carpets were first 
brought from Smyrna and Constan¬ 
tinople, Brussels carpets from Brus¬ 
sels in Belgium, and the Axminster, 
Kidderminster, and Wilton carpets 
from those towns in England. But 
most of these styles are now made 
in different countries ; Brussels car¬ 
pets are manufactured largely in 
England and the United States, and 
Wilton carpets also are produced 
here and in France, where they are 
called moquette. 

Turkey carpets are woven by 
hand, and mostly by young girls in 
families. They are made on a linen 
warp, the warp threads being un¬ 
wound from a roller at the top of the 
loom and wound up on another roller 
at the bottom. The weaver twists 




CARPET 


hi 


CARRIAGE 


around each thread of the warp little 
bits of colored yarn, each tuft being 
of the proper color to make the part 
of the pattern she is there working 
on. When she has gone across the 
row of warp threads, she passes a 
linen weft over the tufts by means of 
a shuttle, and drives it down close 
so that all the tufts of colored yarn 
are fastened securely. Other rows 
are laid in the same way until the 
carpet is done, when the tufts are all 
sheared down to an equal height. 
Turkish carpets are very rich in color 
and very soft to the foot. Persian 
carpets are made like the Turkish, 
and are very similar in color and 
pattern. 

Axminster carpets are an imitation 
of the Turkish, but are handsomer, 
because they are much more evenly 
made, and worsted instead of wool¬ 
len yarns (see Wool) are used in 
them. They are so costly that very 
few of them are now woven. 

Brussels carpets are made of linen 
and worsted, but only the worsted 
shows on the upper side. The un¬ 
der part looks like a coarse linen 
cloth. The worsted yarns are woven 
like velvet over wires which are 
laid across the warp from one side to 
the other. These wires are after¬ 
ward drawn out, leaving the worsted 
yams standing in a row of loops 
across the carpet. The surface of 
all Brussels carpets is made up of 
these rows of little loops, of which 
there are sometimes more than three 
hundred in a yard. 

Wilton or moquette carpets are 
made like Brussels, but they are 
woven over a wire with a groove on 
the top instead of a round one. The 
wire is not drawn out, as in the 
Brussels, but is cut out by drawing 
a sharp knife along the groove. 
This separates all the loops, and they 
stand up and make what is called a 
pile, like the threads in velvet. The 
pile is afterwards sheared so as to 
make a smooth level nap. 

Tapestry and velvet pile carpets 
are imitations of Brussels and Wil¬ 


ton, but are cheaper and do not wear 
so long. In Brussels and Wilton 
carpets as many yarns are used as 
there are colors, but in the tapestry 
there is but one yarn, which is print¬ 
ed different colors in different parts 
of its length, in such a way that in 
weaving the proper color always 
comes in the right place in the pat¬ 
tern. 

Kidderminster carpets are better 
known in this country as ingrain and 
three-ply. Ingrains are made of two 
thicknesses interwoven or ingrained 
together, so that they are really two 
carpets linked together. Three-ply 
carpets are made in the same way, 
but are made up of three instead 
of two webs, curiously interlaced. 
These carpets have the same pattern 
on each side, only the colors are 
different. 

There are many other kinds of 
carpets, such as Venetian, printed 
felt, and rag carpets, but they are 
not much used. 

The word carpet is from the new 
Latin carpetta , plucked wool, prob¬ 
ably from Latin carpere , to pluck. 

CARRIAGE. A carriage is prop¬ 
erly any vehicle on wheels in which 
anything is carried, but the name is 
now usually given only to vehicles 
which are hung on springs, and used 
for pleasure. Four-wheeled vehicles 
used for carrying goods and heavy 
loads are commonly called wagons. 
Carts have only two wheels and gen¬ 
erally no springs. 

In the most ancient times the only 
carriages were two - wheeled carts 
called chariots, which were used for 
both pleasure riding and in war, the 
only difference being that the war- 
chariots were open behind, so that 
the warrior could easily jump in and 
out, while those used for pleasure or 
for show were generally closed be¬ 
hind and had a seat. Chariots were 
also much used for racing in the 
ancient circuses and hippodromes. 
The Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, 
and other nations used nearly the 
same kind of chariot. About the 





CARRIAGE 


112 


CARRIAGE 


time of Christ the chariot went out of 
use, and a kind of carriage with four 
wheels, fitted up with cushions, and 
sometimes with an awning or canopy 
overhead, and drawn by four or six 
horses, came into use among the 
rich ; but it had no springs and was 
a clumsy and heavy vehicle compared 
with the carriages of to-day. After 
the fall of the Roman Empire even 
these went out of use, and people 
travelled from place to place riding 
on horses, mules, or asses. Three 
or four hundred years ago carriages 
began to be used again, but none but 
kings and nobles had them, and they 
were still very rudely made and with¬ 
out springs. In 1550 there were 
only three coaches in all the city of 
Paris. Fourteen years after this 


Queen Elizabeth had a carriage made 
for herself, like the one shown in the 
picture, in which she rode on great 
state occasions. The men with hal¬ 
berds (axes with long handles) on 
their shoulders are the guards, and 
the one behind without any halberd 
is a footman, so called because he 
went on foot beside the carriage. 
In these days footmen ride on the 
carriage, but they still keep the same 
name. 

When the English settled in New 
England (1620), there were but few 
carriages in England, and most of 
them belonged to the nobles and the 
rich. About that time a few hack¬ 
ney coaches, now called hacks in the 
United States, were kept in London. 
Hacks are still used in this country, 



Queen Elizabeth’s Carriage. From an Old Picture. 


but in London one-horse vehicles 
named cabriolets, usually called 
cabs, have taken their place. At 
the time of the Revolution there 
were only a few carriages in this 
country, belonging to rich families. 
They were heavy, clumsy vehicles, 
and were drawn by four or six 
horses. There were then no stage 
coaches, and people travelled mostly 
on horseback ; but after the begin¬ 
ning of this century, when the roads 
were made better, good coaches were 
run between all the large cities, and 
these were largely used by travellers 
until railroads were built. Omni¬ 
buses were first used in Paris about 
1827, and in New York in 1830. 

There are now so many kinds of 


pleasure carriages in use in the world 
that we cannot give even a list of 
their names. Some have four wheels 
and some but two, some are open 
and some have tops, and some are 
made to be drawn by one horse and 
some by two or more. Of carriages 
usually drawn by one horse, the 
principal ones in use are the gig, 
chaise, sulky, and dog-cart, which 
have but two wheels, and the buggy, 
phaeton, rockaway, coupe, brough¬ 
am, T cart, and Victoria, which have 
four wheels, and which are some¬ 
times used with two horses. The 
principal carriages usually drawn by 
two horses are the coach, clarence, 
barouche or brett, and landau. 

The gig is a light two-wheeled 












CARRIAGE 


13 


CARRIAGE 


carriage with a single seat. The 
chaise is much like it, but has a 
calash top — that is, a top like a 
buggy-top, which can be let down. 
A sulky is a very light gig with a 
seat for only one person, and is used 
mostly for trotting races. 

The Dog Cart is so named be¬ 
cause it was once much used by 
sportsmen, who carried their dogs to 
the hunting field in the box behind. 
The dog cart is sometimes driven 
with one horse in the shafts and 
another horse ahead of it. This is 
called driving tandem (Latin, mean¬ 
ing at length). Sometimes three and 
even four horses are driven in this 
way. A French dog-cart has four 
wheels and looks much like a T cart. 
A buggy is a light four-wheeled car¬ 
riage, usually with but one seat. It 



Dog Cart. 


is called a top-buggy when it has a 
calash top, and an open buggy when 
it has no top. In England a light 
chaise is called a buggy. A phaeton 
is something like a buggy, but is 
hung lower, so as to be easy for 
ladies and children to get in and out 
of. It has usually but one seat, but 
some phaetons have a rumble or 
servant’s seat behind. In England 
phaetons are much used with two 
horses ; in the United States they 
are usually drawn by one horse, but 
sometimes by a pair of ponies. The 
low carriages called basket wagons, 
made with a wickerwork body and 
an umbrella top, are sometimes 
called phaetons. A rockaway is a 
light carriage with a fixed top, or one 
which does not let down, and with 
either two or three seats. When 


with three seats, two of them are 
inside facing each other, and the 
other is used by the driver. There 
are a good many different forms of 
the rockaway, and it is much used, 
especially in the country. 



Brougham. 


A Coup6 is a close carriage for 
two persons, with a separate seat 
for a driver. It is the same as a 
brougham, of which a picture is 
given, but differs from it in having 
a round glass front instead of a flat 
front. 

A landaulet is like a coupe, but 
its glass window in front is so made 
that it can shut down into the wood¬ 
work, while'the frame falls forward 
on each side of the driver’s seat, and 
the back part of the top, which is 
leather, shuts down like a buggy- 
top, thus making it into an open car- 



T Cart. 


riage. A coupelet is the same as a 
landaulet, but it is open in front. 

A T Cart is an open wagon with 
two seats, as shown in the picture. 
It is not quite so deep in the body 
as a French dog-cart. 



















CARRIAGE 


CARRIAGE 


114 


A Victoria is a light four-wheeled 
carriage, hung on a kind of springs 
called C springs from their shape, 
which is shown in the picture. It 
has only one seat behind, for two 
persons, and a driver’s seat in front, 
and it is fitted with a calash top. 
In the picture the top is down. The 



Victoria. 


victoria is much like the cabriolet, 
but differs from it in its springs and 
in the way the body is hung. It is 
often used with two horses. 

The Coach is usually made with a 
close wooden body, like that shown 
in the picture. The doors, opening 
on each side, have a window at the 
top, which may be closed tight with 
a glass and a curtain. When open 
the glass shuts down into the panel 
of the door. The coach, which has 
two seats inside facing each other, 
is much used by ladies who wish to 



ride without being seen, and in mak¬ 
ing calls. A clarence is much like 
a coach, but has a rounded glass 
front. 

A Barouche or brett has a falling 
calash top behind, but is open in 
front. The seats are like those in a 
coach, but the front seat is often 


made with a back which shuts down, 
as shown in the picture, so as to cover 
up the front seat. This is usually 
done when only two persons ride in 
a barouche. 

A Landau is shaped much like a 
coach when closed, but the top is 
made of leather so that it can be let 



Barouche. 


down both in front and behind. 
The landau in the picture is shown 
open. A glass - front landau has 
glass windows in front and on the 
sides by the front seat. The win¬ 
dows are so made that they will shut 
down into the panels, and then the 
frame which holds them can be let 
down just as in the leather-front lan¬ 
dau. Sometimes this kind of landau 
is used with the glass front up and 
the leather back down. 

The English Coach, or drag, some¬ 
times called four-in-hand, because it 
is drawn by four horses, is a large 



Landau. 


vehicle, built something like a stage 
coach, with seats inside and outside. 
The owner and his friends ride on 
the outside, and if servants besides 
the footman are taken, they are put 
inside. A very good form of the 
drag is shown in the picture, which 
is one made in New York. This 






























CARRIAGE 


CARRIAGE 


US 


kind of carriage is much used by 
gentleman drivers who wish to carry 
large parties on the road or in the 
park. It is very handy for lunch and 
picnic parties, being fitted with boxes 
for carrying lunch baskets, wines, 
etc. The square box on the top, 
which is called the “ imperial,” can 
easily be made into a table. 

Carriage Making takes a great deal 
of knowledge and skill, and only the 
best of workmen are employed in the 
business. As carriages have to be 
both light and strong, and used 
in all kinds of weather, they must be 
made of the toughest and best sea¬ 
soned timber, and their parts fitted 
together with great care. The 
frame is usually made of ash or of 


hickory, the planking of elm, and 
the panels of white wood, Spanish 
cedar, or mahogany. The work has 
to be joined together as carefully as 
cabinet work. What are called the 
running parts of the carriage, or the 
wheels, axles, etc., are made by a 
different set of workmen from those 
who make the body. The naves or 
hubs of wheels are usually made of 
elm, the spokes of light carriages of 
hickory, and of heavy ones of white 
oak, and the felloes or outside rim 
of oak or ash. Omnibus wheels, 
which have to stand much bumping, 
are made of all white oak. All parts 
of a carriage are fastened with pieces 
of the best iron and steel, the springs 
and parts of the axles are made of 



English Coach, or Drag. 


fine steel, the tires of the wheels, the 
braces, and many other parts of 
iron, though tires are sometimes of 
steel, and the ornamental metal work 
of silver or gold plate. The leather 
work is done with great care and is 
made of the best material. The 
painting of the body in fine carriages 
takes much time and skill. Fifteen 
or sixteen coats of common paint are 
first put on and dried to make a 
body. Each one is left to dry and 
is then rubbed smooth with pumice 
stone ; the colors and ornaments are 
then put on, and when these are dry 
the whole is covered with five or six 
coats of copal varnish. The inside 
of a carriage is finished with fine 


cloths, silks, damasks, plushes, 
leather, and lace, and the work has 
to be as carefully done as the finest 
of furniture upholstery. 

The word carriage is from the old 
English caroche , from Latin carrus, 
cart. 

Hackney coach is from the French 
coche-a-haquenie , a carriage drawn 
by a hackney, a horse kept for hire. 

Cabriolet, usually shortened into 
cab, is from the French cabriole , a 
goat leap or caper ; the carriage was 
so named on account of its light¬ 
ness. 

Omnibus, often shortened into bus, 
is a Latin word meaning for all. 

Gig is from the French gigue, a jig 









CARROT 


116 


CAT 


or lively dance, named from its mo¬ 
tion. 

Chaise is from the French chaise , 
a chair. 

Sulky is so called because the per¬ 
son using it is said to be sulky, from 
wishing to ride alone. 

Coupe is French, and means cut 
off, from couper , to cut; so called 
because a coupS is like a coach with 
the front cut off. 

Brougham, named after Lord 
Brougham. 

Landau, named from the town of 
Landau, in Germany. 

CARROT, the root of a plant 
which grows wild in the countries 
around the Mediterranean, but is 
now cultivated in most parts of 
Europe and the United States. 
Carrots are used in soups and stews, 
and are highly valued as a food for 
horses and cattle. In Germany they 
are sometimes cut up into small 
pieces and roasted, and used to make 
a drink to take the place of coffee. 

The word carrot is from the Latin 
car ota. 

CASHMERE, cloth made of the 
wool of the Cashmere or Thibet 
GOAT. What are commonly called 
camels’ hair or India shawls are not 
made of camels’ hair at all, but of 
the fine wool of a kind of goat raised 
in Asia, chiefly in Thibet and Tar¬ 
tary. The wool is sent from those 
countries into Cashmere, where a 
large part of the people are employed 
in making it into shawls. It is first 
bleached and spun into yarn by 
women, and then dyed of various 
colors. The dyed yarn is bought 
by merchants, who give it out to 
weavers, who make it into shawls in 
their own houses. The workmen 
get only a few cents apiece a day, 
but as it takes two to four men 
a whole year to weave a single 
shawl, these shawls are very costly. 
A fine double one, or one usually 
called in the United States a long 
shawl, sells for $200 to $2000, but 
single or square shawls are cheaper. 
Plain shawls are woven in a LOOM 


with a SHUTTLE, but figured shawls 
are worked with wooden needles, 
each color taking a separate -needle. 
In some of the richest shawls, three 
weavers can make scarcely more 
than a quarter of an inch in a day ; 
but in order to do the work quicker 
shawls are made in many pieces by 
different workmen, and then put to¬ 
gether with so much care that the 
seams cannot be seen. 

Cashmere shawls are now made in 
France, in Paris, Rheims, Amiens, 
and Nimes, which are so nearly like 
those made in India that it is almost 
impossible to tell the difference, and 
many are sold for the real shawls. 

CASSIMERE, or KERSEYMERE 
(perhaps same as Cashmere), a kind 
of woollen cloth, woven with a 
twill, in which it differs from broad¬ 
cloth. The twill may easily be seen 
on the under side, where the nap is 
not raised. 

CASTOR OIL, an oil pressed out 
of the seeds of the castor oil plant, 
which first grew in Asia, but is now 
cultivated in most warm countries. 
In India the plant is sometimes a 
tree four or five times as high as a 
man, but in Europe and the United 
States it is usually a shrub not quite 
so tall as a man. It has large, 
broad, purplish leaves, and is often 
raised in gardens as an ornament. 
The seeds, of which three grow in 
each pod, are about the size of a 
small bean, and have a smooth and 
beautifully marbled skin. In mak¬ 
ing the oil they are first bruised and 
then pressed cold ; the oil is allowed 
to stand and settle for some time, or 
is filtered (see Filter), to clarify it. 
Much castor oil is made in France 
and Italy, where it is used both as a 
medicine and for burning in lamps. 
The plant is largely raised in Illinois, 
and a good deal of oil is pressed in 
St. Louis and other Western cities. 

Castor oil is from castus oil, the 
sacred oil, because the plant is called 
the palma Christi , palm of Christ. 

CAT. It is not known exactly 
where the common house cat came 




CAT 


CAT 


I 


from, but it is thought by most 
people to have sprung from the cats 
of the ancient Egyptians. Herodo¬ 
tus, the historian, tells much about 
these cats. He says they were great¬ 
ly loved and tenderly cared for 
during life, and after death their 
bodies were preserved like those of 
human beings and buried in tombs. 
Many of these cats’ bodies have been 
found in the graveyards of old Egyp¬ 
tian cities. Indeed, some of the old 
Egyptians worshipped cats, and if 
a boy killed one with a stone or by 
setting a dog on it, he would prob¬ 
ably have been hanged at once by the 
angry people. In Persia, too, cats 
have been much thought of from 
the oldest times, and in some 
places cat hospitals were built where 
sick pussies could be taken care of. 
The Arabs love cats and keep them 
as pets. An old Arab once told a 
traveller that when Adam and Eve 
were driven out of Paradise, God 
gave them two friends to defend and 
comfort them, the dog and the cat. 
In the body of the dog he put the 
soul of a brave man, and in that of 
the cat the spirit of a gentle woman ; 
and this is the reason why the Arabs 
have always loved these animals. 

There are a good many kinds of 
cats. Among the handsomest is the 
Spanish or tortoise shell cat, which 
lives mostly in the south of Europe. 
Its colors and markings are like 
those of tortoise shell. The Angora 
cat, from Angora, in Asia Minor, has 
long brownish-white or slate-colored 
silky hair, and the Persian long white 
or gray hair and a bushy tail. The 
Maltese or Chartreuse cat is bluish- 
gray ; the Chinese cat has long, silky, 
hanging ears ; and the Manx cat of 
the Isle of Man has six instead of 
five claws on each foot, and no tail. 
The animal called the wild cat in 
North America is a kind of LYNX ; 
the true wild cat lives in the wooded 
parts of Europe, but not in this 
country. The common house cat 
will sometimes become wild and live 
in the woods like other wild animals, 


i7 


but it will not become a real wild cat. 
The house cat often shows fondness 
for its master, but not so much as 
the dog, and it is more apt to show 
affection for its home than for the 
persons with whom it lives. When 
carried away to a strange place at a 
long distance from its home, a cat 
has been known to find its way back, 
although it had never been over the 
road before ; and sometimes when a 
family has removed to a new home 
the cat has stayed behind, preferring 
the old house, even with strangers 
in it, to a new one with its friends. 
Cats love a warm and comfortable 
place, and will sit by the hour in the 
chimney corner with eyes half closed 
and showing their delight by a soft 
purring. They usually go in dry 
places and are careful not to wet 
their feet or their fur, which has 
nothing oily about it and is therefore 
easily wet. But although they do 
not like water, they can swim well, 
and will often go into the water 
to catch fish. I have heard of a cat 
that would watch beside the sea for 
fish just as it would for rats beside a 
rat-hole, and on seeing a fish would 
dive in all over and bring it out alive. 
Another pussy used to go trout¬ 
fishing with her master, and would 
sit and watch until a trout was 
landed, when she would spring upon 
it and kill it. At other times she 
would fish for herself, running along 
the bank with her eye on a trout un¬ 
til she saw it stop, when she would 
dive down like an arrow from a bow 
and seize it. She would also catch 
water rats in the same way. 

The eyes of the cat are so made 
that it can see with very little light, 
and it delights in prowling around 
in the night time, watching for prey. 
It will often sit for hours by a hole, 
waiting patiently for a mouse to 
come out. When it catches a 
mouse, it usually torments it before 
killing it, letting it go a little way and 
then pouncing upon it and catching 
it again. But when a cat catches a 
bird, it kills it at once, as if it knew 




CAT 


118 


CATBIRD 


that the bird could get away easier 
than the mouse. 

Though cats love to catch mice, 
they seldom eat them unless they are 
very hungry. They like fish better 
than anything else, and the flesh of 
birds better than that of four-footed 
animals. They are great enemies to 
birds in the breeding season, and 
catch many young ones when they 
are just ready to fly. A cat once 
found a bird’s nest in the gable of 
an old barn. There were five eggs 
in it, but pussy did not want these ; 
she preferred to wait for them to 
hatch. She was seen to go, some¬ 
times as often as three times a day, 
and peep into the nest. At last she 
was rewarded for her long watch, 
for as soon as the birds were hatched 
she ate them. Country cats are 
often great hunters, and catch, be¬ 
sides birds, hares, rabbits, weasels, 
moles, and other small quadrupeds. 

Cats were very scarce in Britain in 
old times, and laws were passed for 
the punishment of persons who stole 
or killed them. If anyone killed the 
cat which guarded the prince’s gran¬ 
ary he hacf to pay a fine of as much 
wheat as would cover the cat when 
hung up by the tail with its head 
touching the floor. 

Cats may be easily taught many 
amusing tricks. Begin to train them 
when young, and teach them first 
to love you. Any cat can jump well, 
but it can be taught to make won 
derful leaps. Put little pieces of 
meat at different heights, and let it 
jump for them. It will soon learn 
to spring seven or eight feet. I 
have heard of a cat which would 
jump from the floor to the top of a 
parlor door and bring down a piece 
of meat on the top of it. You may 
easily teach a cat to jump through 
your arms by first holding them low 
and making it jump through them 
both ways, and then holding them a 
little higher day by day. It will be¬ 
come so expert in time that it will 
jump through your arms when held 
above your head. In the same way 


a cat may be taught to jump through 
hoops of different sizes and held at 
different heights. To teach a cat to 
jump through a hoop covered with 
tissue paper, the paper must first be 
oiled so that it can be seen through ; 
but puss will soon learn to go through 
plain paper. Cats may also be 
taught to turn somersaults, to lie 
stretched out as if dead, to give a 
paw as if shaking hands, to open 
and shut the eyes at command, or to 
sit up on the hind legs and beg as 
little dogs are often taught. Always 
give your cat something to eat and 
drink after each lesson ; it will re¬ 
member it and be a better scholar 
for it. At such times it will like 
water better than milk. 

Cats’ skins are used for making 
sleigh robes and rugs, and for rub¬ 
bers for electrical machines. In dry, 
frosty weather much electricity 
may be waked up by rubbing a cat’s 
back with the hand. 

The common cat is a mammal of 
the order carnivora , or flesh-eating 
animals, and of the same family with 
the LION, TIGER, LEOPARD, PAN¬ 
THER, JAGUAR, COUGUAR, and 
LYNX. 

The word cat is Anglo-Saxon. 

CATBIRD. The catbird is found 
only in North America. In the 
United States it spends the winter 
in the South, and comes North in 
April and May. It is more slender 
than the robin, and is dark gray or 
slate color above and bluish-gray 
beneath, with head and tail brown¬ 
ish-black. It mews only when it is 
angry or frightened. It hates cats 
and snakes, and may often be seen, 
when one of these is around, sitting 
on a twig mewing and jerking its tail 
from side to side. But it can sing 
also very sweetly, and can imitate 
the songs of other birds, but not so 
well as the mocking bird. 

The catbird builds its nest of 
twigs, mixed with leaves, weeds, and 
grass, generally in the middle of 
bramble bushes, and lays four to six 
greenish-blue eggs. It is very fond 




CATERPILLAR 


CATERPILLAR 


119 


of its young, and will often feed and 
bring up the young of other birds. 
Its food is chiefly insects, worms, 
fruit, and berries. Catbirds are 
often persecuted by boys, but they 
ought to have the best of treatment, 
for they help the farmer by 
destroying grubs, worms, and 
wasps and other insects much 
more than they hurt his fruit 
and berries. 

The catbird belongs to the 
order insessores, or perching 
BIRDS, and to the thrush family, 
to which also belongs the 
MOCKING BIRD and the Ameri¬ 
can ROBIN. 

The catbird is so called be¬ 
cause it sometimes mews like a half- 
grown cat. 

CATERPILLAR, the common 
name of the larva or worm which 
finally turns into the butterfly or 
moth. In the article Butterfly is 


smaller. Some have smooth skins 
and some are covered with hairs ; 
some spin large nests in trees where 
they live in societies, some roll up 
leaves for houses, and some burrow 
in the ground or into leaves, twigs, 




Caterpillar of Carolina Moth—Western Tobacco 
Worm. 

told how the larva or caterpillar is 
hatched from the butterfly’s egg by 
the warmth of the sun. There are 
as many different kinds of cater¬ 
pillars as there are kinds of butter¬ 
flies and moths, and there are also 



Butterfly Caterpillar. 

as many differences between them. 
They vary much in size, being gen¬ 
erally about an inch long, but some 
are much larger and some are 


Moth Caterpillar rolled up in Leaf. 

and fruits ; some feed on leaves, 
some on flowers, some on seeds of 
fruits, and some on roots. Butterfly 
caterpillars have usually sixteen legs, 
while those of moths vary from ten 
to sixteen. Some caterpillars have 
no legs in the middle part of 
the body, and move by draw¬ 
ing themselves up in arches 
or loops, like the canker 
worm. They are hence called 
spanners, loopers, or measur¬ 
ing worms. Some lead a soli¬ 
tary life, and have nothing to 
do with others, though they 
may live on the same tree, 
and some always live to¬ 
gether and go in regular pro¬ 
cessions when they leave their nests. 

The size of the caterpillar when 
hatched is very large for the egg from 
which it comes, and 
it grows very fast. 

It eats much more 
in proportion than 
any of the large 
animals, devouring 
sometimes twice its 
own weight of food 
in a day. It is this 
which makes it so harmful to plants 
and growing crops. It changes its 
skin several times during this stage. 

Before turning into a butterfly or 
moth, the caterpillar becomes a pupa 
or chrysalis (Greek ckrusos , gold), 



Measuring 

Worm. 










CATERPILLAR 


120 


CATGUT 


so called because many kinds have 
bright golden colors. The chrysalis 
of the butterfly is usually pointed 
and has little warts over its surface, 
but that of the moth 
is oval and smooth. 
When the time 
comes for the cater¬ 
pillar to change into 
a chrysalis, it ceases 
to eat and hangs it¬ 
self to the under sur¬ 
face of something, 
generally a leaf, eith¬ 
er by its legs or by a 
thread of silk which 
it spins. It now 
changes its skin for 
the last time, and if 
it is a butterfly chry¬ 
salis the new skin dries, covering the 
caterpillar in a kind of horny cover¬ 
ing. It eats nothing and does not 
stir while in this state. If the 
weather be hot the chrysalis case 
bursts open in eight or ten days, but 
sometimes this does not take place 
until two or three weeks. The 
butterfly is now seen with his wings 
hanging downward. In a few days 
these grow to their proper size, the 
outside of the body hardens, and the 
perfect butterfly flies away to live on 
the honey of the flowers and to lay 
eggs to hatch more caterpillars, which 
in turn will pass through the chrys¬ 
alis state and become butterflies. 



Pupa of 
Butterfly. 



Pupa of Moth. 


Caterpillars have many enemies. 
Poultry and all other insect-eating 
birds feed on them, and many in¬ 
sects also eat them. If it were not 
for this they would increase so fast 
that a great deal of damage would 


be done to fruits, grain, and other 
vegetation. A single butterfly or 
moth will lay 200 to 700 eggs ; and 
it often happens that a caterpillar 
nest in a tree will have in it more 
than five hundred caterpillars, all of 
which have come from the eggs of 
one insect. Sometimes these all 
live together until they have passed 
through the chrysalis state, and 
sometimes they separate before that. 

The word caterpillar is from the 
old English words cate , food, and 
piller , robber or plunderer ; and the 
caterpillar is so called because it 
robs leaves and fruit. 

CATFISH, the name of a family of 
fishes, found mostly in the muddy 
bottoms of rivers and ponds. The 
common catfish of the New England 
and Middle States is called also bull¬ 
head, bull-pout, or horned-pout. It 
is usually eight or nine inches long, 
weighs one half to three fourths of a 
pound, and has a slimy skin, like 
that of an eel. Its color is blackish- 
brown on the back, lighter brown 
on the sides, and yellowish-white 
below. It has two fleshy horns on 
the top of the head between the 
snout and the eye, and four others 
on the lower jaw. The bull-head 
may be easily caught by fishing near 
the bottom with either angleworm 
or raw beef bait. It bites best just 
at dusk. Many think it the best of 
fresh-water fishes for eating. 

The great lake catfish of the north¬ 
ern lakes is olive-brown, has a forked 
tail,and is sometimes more than a yard 
long. Other kinds of very large cat¬ 
fish are also found in the Western 
rivers, but their flesh is rather coarse. 

The catfish is so called because it 
has whiskers like a cat. 

CATGUT, the material from which 
the strings of violins, guitars, harps, 
etc., are made. It is wrongly 
named, for it is not made of the guts 
of cats, but of those of sheep, and 
sometimes of those of horses, asses, 
and mules. The best musical 
strings are made in Italy, but many 
are also made in France. 








CATNIP 


121 


CATTLE 


CATNIP, or CATMINT, a plant 
common in the United States, so 
called because cats are very fond of 
its leaves. They have a somewhat 
sharp and bitter taste. A tea made 
by soaking them in hot water is 
given as a medicine. 

CATTLE. The word cattle really 
includes all kinds of domestic ani¬ 
mals, such as cows, oxen, horses, 
mules, sheep, goats, and swine, but 
in the United States it is generally 
taken to mean horned cattle only, 
such as bulls, cows, and oxen, and 
it will be used in this way in this 
article. In England horned cattle 
are commonly called neat cattle. 

There were no cattle in America 
when it was discovered by Colum¬ 
bus ; but the Spanish settlers brought 
over bulls and cows with them, and 
now all the great plains of South 
America are covered with herds of 
wild cattle descended from them. 
These cattle are large, long-legged, 
and have very long, branching 
horns. Most of the cattle in Cali¬ 
fornia and in Texas are also de¬ 
scended from early Spanish cattle. 
The common cattle in other parts of 
the United States are descended from 
bulls and cows.brought from Eng¬ 
land by the early colonists ; but in 
many places these have become 
mixed with other breeds brought to 
this country at a later date. All 
common cattle are usually called 
natives. From them we get most of 
the BEEF which we eat, and many of 
the cows are as good for giving milk 
as some of the foreign breeds. 

Among the most valuable of the 
foreign breeds, which have been 
brought to this country mostly in 
this century, are the Durhams, the 
Ayrshires, and the Alderneys. The 
Durhams, named from Durham 
County, England, whence they were 
first brought to the United States, 
are usually called short-horns here, 
on account of the shortness of their 
horns, but in England they are 
known as the Holderness breed. 
They are usually dark-red pied with 


white, and are noted for the quantity 
and richness of their milk, and for 
the fineness of their beef. In the 
Western States they are the favorite 
breed. The Ayrshires, first brought 
from Ayrshire in Scotland, are gen¬ 
erally piebald, that is, of mixed col¬ 
ors, most brownish-red, yellow, and 
white. They are highly prized for 
their milk, but not so much for beef, 
and they do not fatten easily. The 
Alderneys or Jerseys, brought from 
Alderney, one of the Jersey or Chan¬ 
nel Islands, off the north coast of 
France, are commonly light red or 
yellow mixed with white, and are 
small and graceful in form. They 
give very rich milk, but not so much 
as the Durhams, and as they are not 
as good for beef as some other 
breeds, they are not thought to be 
very profitable. But they are often 
kept in private dairies on account of 
the richness of their cream, and of 
their gentleness and beauty. Devon 
cattle, from Devonshire, England, 
are a handsome, dark red breed, 
which make fine oxen. 

In Northumberland County, in the 
north of England, in the park of 
Chillingham Castle, are kept many 
wild cattle. They are rather small, 
with straight backs, short slim legs, 
and fine forms, and are all of the 
same color, creamy white all over, 
excepting that the tips of their horns, 
their hoofs, and the ends of their 
noses are black, and the insides and 
a part of the outsides of their ears 
are reddish brown. They are very 
timid and will run like deer, and 
sometimes they will go into the 
depths of the forest and hide for 
weeks at a time. These cattle are 
supposed to be the descendants of 
the wild cattle which lived in the 
forests of the north of England and 
Scotland in ancient times. There is 
another herd at Hamilton Castle in 
Scotland, which are like those at 
Chillingham, but have black instead 
of red ears. 

The word cattle comes from the 
new Latin word catalla, which means 





CAUSTIC 


122 


CENT 


goods, because in old times cattle 
were the principal goods of every¬ 
body. Our word chattels comes from 
the same word. 

CAUSTIC, any substance used by 
physicians and surgeons to burn or 
eat away skin or flesh, when sore or 
diseased. The principal caustics are 
lunar caustic (SILVER nitrate), so 
called because lima (Latin, moon) is 
the old name for silver ; nitric 
ACID ; copper sulphate or blue 
vitriol ; and caustic potash. 

The word caustic is from the 
Greek kaustikon , that which burns, 
from kaiein, to burn. 

CEDAR, the name of several kinds 
of evergreen trees. In the United 
States the white cedar abounds south 
of Massachusetts and Ohio. Its 
wood, which is light red, is valued 
for making fence posts and shingles. 
The red cedar grows in most parts 
of North America and in the West 
Indies. Its wood is bright red, 
hard, and lasting. It has a pleas¬ 
ant smell, which is not liked by in¬ 
sects, and it is therefore much used 
for making chests and closets to 
keep clothes in. It is also used in 
cabinet work and for making lead 
pencils. The best red cedar for 
lead PENCILS is brought from 
Florida. Spanish cedar, of which 
cigar boxes are made, is a kind of 
mahogany. It is also used some¬ 
times for lead pencils. 

The cedar of Lebanon is a very 
large tree which grows in the coldest 
parts of the Lebanon mountains in 
Syria. Its wood was much sought 
in ancient times for building, but 
the trees are now very scarce. 

The word cedar is from the Latin 
cedrus. 

CELERY, a plant of the parsley 
family, used chiefly as a salad and 
to flavor soups. In its wild state it 
is said to be rank and poisonous, 
but by cultivation it becomes health¬ 
ful and pleasant to the taste. The 
stalks are not naturally white, as we 
usually see them, but are bleached 
while growing by heaping the earth 


up around them nearly to the leaves. 

The word celery is from the Latin 
selinon , parsley. 

CELLULOID. See Gun Cotton. 

CEMENT, any substance used to 
make bodies stick to each other, 
such as glue, mortar, etc. The 
ancient Egyptians made a kind of 
mortar out of Nile mud and gypsum. 
The Babylonians used a cement 
made of bitumen. The Greeks were 
very skilful in making cements, but 
the Romans were superior to them, 
and their water cement was as good 
as any now made. It was made of 
pozzuolana, a kind of lava found at 
Pozzuoli, near Naples, and lime. 
What is now called Roman cement 
is not exactly like the old Roman 
cement, but is made chiefly of a kind 
of limestone containing clay, which 
is burned, crushed, and ground. 
Portland cement is made from clay 
and chalk obtained from the valley 
of the Medway, in England. These 
and other similar cements which 
harden quickly under water are 
called hydraulic cements, and are 
largely used in building aqueducts, 
foundations for bridges, break¬ 
waters, cisterns, and other works 
under water. 

Many kinds of cement are used 
for mending broken glass, china, 
and earthenware. They are made 
of various things, such as Canada 
balsam, shell-LAC, copal or mastic 
varnish, isinglass, india rubber, 
etc. Diamond cement, so called be¬ 
cause it is used by Armenian jewel¬ 
lers in setting diamonds, is made of 
gum mastic and isinglass dissolved 
in spirits of wine. The white of 
egg, mixed with a little powdered 
quick lime, makes a good cement 
for crockery. 

The word cement is from the Lat¬ 
in ccementum , quarried stone. 

CENT. The first United States 
coin called a cent. (1793) was made 
of copper, and was larger than the- 
present quarter dollar. A half cent, 
of half the size of the cent, was also 
coined. In 1857 the coining of the 




CHAIN 


123 


CHAMPAGNE 


half cent was stopped, and a new 
cent, about as large round as a ten- 
cent piece but thicker, and made of 
eighty-eight parts of copper and 
twelve parts of nickel, was coined. 
In 1864 this cent was changed for 
the present BRONZE cent, which is 
made of ninety-five parts of copper 
and five parts of tin. The two-cent 
coins are also of bronze, and the 
three and five cent pieces are three 
parts copper and one part nickel. 

The word cent is from the Latin 
centum , a hundred ; and the coin is 
so called because there are a hun¬ 
dred in a dollar. 

CHAIN. The picture shows how 
common chains are made. Pieces 
are cut off of iron rods of the right 
size, as in a , bent round as in b, and 
then put together as in c. Some¬ 
times the links are only bent to¬ 
gether, but in strong chains the ends 
are welded—that is, they are heated 



Chain Making. 

white hot and hammered together 
until each link becomes a solid ring. 
Chains are made of many sizes, from 
dog chains with small links of wire 
to the great CABLES for ships with 
links as large as a man’s wrist. Still 
larger ones are sometimes made and 
stretched across rivers and the 
mouths of harbors in war time to 
keep out an enemy’s ships. Such a 
chain was put across the Hudson 
River near West Point in the Revo¬ 
lutionary War to keep the British 
ships from passing up. Each link 
of this chain was about two feet long 
and weighed as much as a medium¬ 
sized man (140 pounds). Some of 
the links are still at West Point. 

An endless chain is a chain with 
the ends fastened together so as to 
form a chain ring without any ends. 
Such a chain is used in the chain 
PUMP, where it turns round and 


round on two wheels or rollers, one 
at the top and one at the bottom ; 
also in the DREDGE or machine for 
clearing mud out of the channels of 
rivers and harbors. Chain-shot is 
told about under Shot and Shell. 

The word chain is in French 
chaine, and in Latin catena . 

CHALK, a soft kind of limestone 
or carbonate of lime. It is made up 
almost entirely of the shells of little 
sea animals, which in the course of 
ages have become packed together so 
closely and in such immense quan¬ 
tities that in some parts of the world 
they form vast cliffs twenty times 
as high as a house. Though gen¬ 
erally yellowish-white, its color is 
sometimes snow-white. It is usually 
soft, but is often hard enough to be 
used for building stone. When 
burned it makes good lime for MOR¬ 
TAR, and a good manure ; and when 
ground and purified by washing it is 
called whiting or Spanish white, used 
for polishing metals and glass. 
Chalk is given as a medicine and is 
used for cleaning the teeth ; it is also 
largely used for marking on black¬ 
boards. 

Black Chalk is a mineral different 
from white chalk. It is a kind of 
clay, colored with CARBON, and is 
usually found near or in coal mines. 

Red Chalk is also a kind of clay, 
colored with oxide of IRON. The 
coarser kinds are used by carpenters 
for marking on wood, and the finer 
kinds by artists. It is found mostly 
in Germany. 

French Chalk is a kind of soap¬ 
stone. It is used by tailors for 
marking on cloth, by glaziers to mark 
on glass, and in the manufacture of 
porcelain. 

The word chalk is from the Anglo- 
Saxon calc , which is from the Latin 
calx , lime. 

CHAMPAGNE, a kind of sparkling 
wine, made mostly at Rheims and 
Epernay, in France. The grapes are 
pressed in September and October, 
and the juice allowed to stand in 
large vats for twelve to eighteen 











CHARCOAL 


124 


CHARCOAL 


hours. After the froth which rises 
has been skimmed off, the wine is 
then drawn into barrels and left to 
ferment (see Beer). In December, 
when it is clear, it is again drawn off 
and several kinds are mixed together 
in vats, the flavor of the wine depend¬ 
ing greatly on the way it is mixed. 
It is next drawn again into barrels 
and allowed to rest until spring, when 
it is bottled and corked. The bottles 
are put into cellars and laid on their 
sides. A second fermentation now 
takes place, which bursts about ten 
and sometimes twenty bottles in 
every hundred. After this is finished 
the good bottles are restacked and 
allowed to lie for a year and a half, 
when a thick sediment or scum is 
found to have settled in the neck of 


each bottle. The bottles are then 
uncorked and the sediment poured 
out, when all are refilled with fresh 
wine and recorked. Champagne 
made in this way is what is called dry 
wine, which means that it has no 
taste of sugar in it ; but that which 
is to be sent to foreign countries 
usually has some melted rock candy 
mixed with brandy put into it. The 
corks are now fastened with wires 
and covered with wax or tinfoil to 
keep out the air. Champagne, when 
sold, is always two or three years 
old. A great deal of false cham¬ 
pagne is made in this country out of 
cider and other things. 

Champagne got its name from the 
old province of Champagne, France, 
where it was first made. 



Charcoal Pit. 


CHARCOAL, coal made by char¬ 
ring wood. In making charcoal 
sticks of wood are piled up in great 
round heaps, with a hole left in the 
middle for a chimney, as shown in 
the picture. Another hole is left 
from the outside of the heap along 
the ground to the bottom of the 
chimney, so as to let the air in and 
make a draught. When the wood 
is all piled up the spaces between the 
logs are filled with chips, twigs, and 
leaves, so as to make the pile even 
all over, and it is then covered with 
sods and earth. The heap is now 
fired at the bottom of the chimney, 
and the fire spreads little by little 
all through the wood, care being 


taken to make holes around the 
outside, now and then to give it air, 
and to put on more sods and earth 
to keep the wood from blazing. 
The heap, which is called a coal-pit, 
because charcoal was first burned in 
pits dug in the ground, has to be 
watched night and day, for it is only 
by keeping the air almost entirely 
away from the wood when it is burn¬ 
ing that we can make charcoal. 
The reason is this : wood is made 
up mostly of CARBON mixed with 
water and some other things. Now 
charcoal is almost pure carbon ; 
therefore to make it we must drive 
off from the wood the things with 
which it is mixed. This is done by 













CHEESE 


125 


CHEESE 


burning it in a place where but little 
air can get to it. Some air must be 
let in, because fire will not burn 
without OXYGEN. If it would burn 
without air we could save all the 
carbon in it, but as it will not we 
can save only a part of it when we 
burn it in a coal pit. The rest 
mixes with the oxygen of the air 
and makes CARBONIC ACID gas. 
If the coal pit were not kept covered 
up so as to prevent the air from get¬ 
ting to all parts of it, its oxygen 
would mix with the carbon in the 
wood, and it would all fly off into 
the air, and we should get only ashes 
instead of charcoal. 

When the whole heap of wood is 
turned into charcoal, which takes 
about a week for small heaps and 
two or three weeks for larger ones, 
all the holes are closed up and the 
pit is left for one or two days to 
cool. It is 'then uncovered, part at 
a time, and the charcoal spread out 
in layers. This is usually done at 
night, so that if any of it is still 
afire, it may be easily seen and put 
out. 

Wood charcoal is largely used as 
a fuel, especially in countries where 
there is no mineral or hard coal, and 
also for smelting metals. It has the 
power of absorbing or taking up 
smells and gases, and therefore is 
used to destroy the bad odor from 
decaying animal and vegetable mat¬ 
ter, especially in sewers and drains. 
It also takes out coloring matter from 
liquids, and is much used in FILTERS 
for cleansing and purifying water, 
syrups, etc. Physicians sometimes 
use powdered charcoal in poultices 
for bad sores, as it has the power of 
cleansing them and keeping them 
from smelling. It is also given for 
indigestion and is used for tooth- 
powder. One of the most impor¬ 
tant uses of charcoal is for making 
gunpowder. Animal charcoal is 
made by burning bone, ivory, 
etc. 

CHEESE, the curd of milk pressed 
in a hoop or mould. In making 


cheese the curd orcaseineof the milk 
must first be separated from the 
whey, or watery part. In the article 
Milk is explained how this takes 
place in sour milk. But as the 
caseine of sour milk will not make 
good cheese, it must be separated 
from the whey while the milk is 
sweet. This is done by putting an 
acid juice called rennet into the milk. 
Rennet is the dried inner part of the 
stomach of a young calf. When 
needed for use a piece of it is soaked 
in water, and some of the water is 
poured into the milk, which has 
been warmed. In about an hour 
the caseine and cream will be found 
to have separated from the whey 
and settled to the bottom. This is 
caused by the ACID in the rennet, 
which turns the sugar in the milk 
into lactic acid, and this mixes with 
the caseine and curdles it. The 
curd thus made is then drained of 
the whey, salted, and pressed in a 
cheese press for two or three days, 
when it is put away in a cheese 
room to ripen. Some cheeses ripen 
in a few months, but some, like the 
Italian Parmesan, take two or 
three years. Cheeses are frequently 
colored with ANNOTTO. Parmesan 
cheese is colored and flavored with 
saffron, sage cheese with sage. The 
best English cheeses are the Stil¬ 
ton, Cheshire, and Cheddar. Gruy&re 
cheese, made in Switzerland, is 
strongly flavored with herbs. The 
French Roquefort cheese is made 
from the milk of sheep and goats. 
Brie (French) and Neufchatel (Swiss) 
cheese are made of pure cow’s 
cream. 

Cheese has been made from the 
most ancient times, and it was a 
common article of food among the 
Greeks and Romans. The Tartars 
make cheese from the milk of mares, 
the Arabs from that of camels, and 
the Laplanders from that of rein¬ 
deer. 

The word cheese is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon cese, which is from the 
Latin casens . 





CHERRY 


126 


CHIMNEY 


CHERRY. The Romans had only 
eight kinds of cherries ; but now 
more than three hundred kinds are 
known. The wild cherry, one of 
the largest of our forest trees, grows 
all over the United States. Its wood 
is fine and close grained, and of a 
reddish color which grows darker 
with age. It is much used by cabi¬ 
net makers. The fruit, which is 
nearly black and somewhat bitter, is 
much smaller than the common 
cherry, and grows in clusters on 
a stem. It is used for flavoring 
liquors, and its bark is used in medi¬ 
cine. Cultivated cherries are of 
many different colors, from light 
pink through many shades of red to 
black. They are used as dessert 
fruit, preserved and dried, and in 
making various cordials, such as 
cherry-brandy, and Maraschino and 
Kirschwasser cordials. 

The word cherry is from the Latin 
cerasus , and the fruit was so called 
because the Romans first brought 
it from Cerasus in Asia Minor. 

CHESTNUT, the fruit of a large 
tree which grows wild in Europe and 
the United States. The chestnut is 
a handsome, wide-spreading tree, 
and among the largest which grows. 
One on Mount Etna is so large that 
it would take sixty-five of a man’s 
steps to go round it (160 feet). The 
timber of the chestnut is hard and 
lasting, and is much used in house 
building and in making furniture. 
Its bark is used in tanning leather, 
but it is not so good as oak bark. 
Its fruit grows in a prickly case, 
which splits open into four parts 
when frost comes, and lets the nuts 
fall out. Chestnuts are much eaten 
by squirrels, and they form a large 
part of the food of poor people in the 
south of Europe, being eaten raw, 
boiled, or roasted, or ground into 
meal and made into bread and pud¬ 
dings. The best kind of French 
chestnuts are called marrons. A 
small kind is called chinquapin in 
America. 

The word chestnut is from the 


Latin castanea. The Romans first 
found the tree at Castanea, a town in 
Thessaly, and named it castanea 
nux, Castanean nut. 

CHICCORY, the wild endive, a 
plant belonging to the same family 
with the DANDELION. It has a thick 
milky root, which is cut up, dried, 
roasted, and ground, and used either 
for coffee or mixed with coffee. It 
looks like ground coffee, and though 
it makes a drink of a pleasant taste, 
it has none of the flavor of coffee. 
When much used it is often hurtful, 
making those who drink it very ner¬ 
vous. 

The word chiccory is from the 
Latin cichoriutn. Chiccory is some¬ 
times called succory. 

CHICKADEE. This little bird is 
sometimes called also black-cap, 
and sometimes snow-bird. It is 
ashy-gray on the back and brownish- 
white below, and the top of the head 
and the back of the neck are pure 
black. The chickadee is a lively lit¬ 
tle bird, and may often be seen run¬ 
ning over trees and sticking its bill 
into every crevice, searching for in¬ 
sects. In this way it destroys vast 
numbers of canker-worms and grubs 
and does great service. In the win¬ 
ter it comes near houses, looking 
after crumbs and seeds, and is 
lively in the coldest weather. It 
builds its nest in hollows of trees 
and lays eight or ten whitish eggs, 
with brownish-red spots. The 
chickadee is found all the year round 
in almost all parts of the United 
States. 

The chickadee belongs to the 
order insessores, or perching birds, 
and to the warbler family, to which 
belong also the bluebird and the 
European robin. 

The chickadee gets its name from 
its song, which sounds like chicka¬ 
dee-dee-dee. 

CHIMNEY. The ancients had no 
chimneys ; they seldom built fires in 
their houses, but warmed their 
rooms with live coals brought in a 
pan or in a small stove that was eas- 





CHINCHILLA 


127 


CHIPMUNK 


ily moved. Even in modern times, 
as late as Queen Elizabeth’s reign, 
chimneys were found only in the 
houses of the rich. In most houses 
fires were built in a hollow place in 
the floor in the middle of the room, 
and the smoke went out of a hole 
left in the roof above it. 

The reason why smoke goes up a 
chimney is that it is warmer than 
the air outside, and warm AIR al¬ 
ways rises. Great care has to be 
taken in building chimneys. If they 
are too high and too large, espe¬ 
cially in cold places, the heat may be 
used up before it gets to the top, 
and they will not draw well, but will 
smoke. The chimneys of factories 
are often built very high, but they 
are narrow for their height, and as 
very hot fires are kept up in the fur¬ 
naces, the air within them is kept 
heated all the time. The higher the 
column of heated air is, the greater is 
the difference of weight between it 
and the air outside ; the higher the 
chimney is, therefore, the greater the 
draught up it will be if the air in it 
can be heated hot enough. Such tall 
chimneys are also useful to carry off 
the bad gases and smells that rise 
from some kinds of manufactures, 
and would poison the air around 
them. 

House chimneys in cities some¬ 
times smoke because higher build¬ 
ings near them turn the wind and 
make it blow down their flues. Such 
a chimney is often cured by putting 
up a pipe from it higher than the 
building, or by putting a bent pipe 
on the top, fitted with a vane which 
turns the mouth of the pipe away 
from where the wind blows. This 
keeps the cold air from blowing 
down, and lets the warm air rise 
and go out. 

The word chimney is from the 
French chejninte, which is from the 
Latin catninus, fireplace. 

CHINCHILLA, a small animal 
found chiefly in the Andes of Chili 
and Peru. It is about as large as a 
squirrel, with a head much like a 


rabbit’s, with large black eyes, and 
ears nearly as long as the head. 
The hinder legs are longer than the 
front ones, and it sits on its haun¬ 
ches when eating, holding its food 
in its fore paws. It is valued for its 
fur, which is thick, soft, and gray, 
and is much used for cloak linings, 
trimmings, and other articles for 
ladies’ and children’s wear. 

The chinchilla is a mammal of 
the order rodentia , or gnawing ani¬ 
mals. 

The word chinchilla is Spanish. 

CHINTZ, a kind of glazed printed 
calico, with a pattern in many bright 
colors. It is printed like CALICO and 
glazed afterward. Chintz is much 
used for covering furniture, and 
sometimes for bed and window 
hangings. 

The word chintz is from the Hin¬ 
doo chhint , spotted cotton cloth. 

CHIPMUNK. Chipmunks are 
sometimes called ground squirrels 
because they live in the ground, 
striped squirrels on account of the 
marks on their fur, and cheeping 
squirrels on account of the cheep¬ 
ing noise they make. The com¬ 
mon chipmunk has a body five to 
six inches long, and a tail which is 
not so bushy as in other squirrels, and 
a little shorter. The fur is yellow¬ 
ish-brown mixed with gray above 
and white below, and the back and 
sides are marked with five black 
stripes running lengthwise. The 
feet are large and fitted with strong 
claws for digging. They burrow 
deep into the ground, usually under 
the roots of a tree or under a stone 
wall, and make a round nest at the 
bottom, generally with two en¬ 
trances, as shown in the picture, 
but sometimes with three or more. 
The nest is lined with fine grass, 
and in this the chipmunks live and 
bring up their young, of which they 
usually have four or five, born in 
May. Several other round places 
are dug near the nest later in the 
summer to store up food in for win¬ 
ter. Chipmunks have pouches 





CHIPMUNK 


128 


CHISEL 


inside their cheeks, in which they 
collect nuts and seeds, and when 
these are crammed full they scamper 
home and empty them. Besides 
nuts, berries, and acorns, they feed 
chiefly on Indian corn, wheat, buck¬ 
wheat, cherry stones, and grass 
seeds, and all these things have 
been found stored up in their holes. 



During July and part of August 
chipmunks do little but play, seem¬ 
ing to spend all their time from sun¬ 
rise to sunset in galloping over the 
ground, fences, and walls, chasing 
each other like children playing tag, 
and trying to bite each others’ tails. 
If a hawk happens to come in sight, 
every one stops wherever it hap¬ 
pens to be, hoping that it may not 
be seen, but if one be near its hole, 
it will dart into that, run down to 
the nest, then turn about and come 
quickly back to the entrance and 
peer around with its sharp little eyes 
until the danger is past. Some¬ 
times one is caught by a hawk, but 
the weasel is the worst enemy of 
chipmunks, as it follows them into 
their burrows and kills them there. 
About the middle of August they be¬ 
gin to work in earnest, and they may 
be seen with their cheek pouches 
filled, looking like children with the 
mumps, carrying nuts and seeds 
into their store-houses. When the 
first white frosts come they go into 
their nests and live on the food they 
have laid up until winter sets in, 
when they become numb, and lie so 


until early spring. With the first 
warm days they wake up again and 
live on their stores until they can get 
berries and other food outside. 

Chipmunks are easily caught in 
traps, but are not easily tamed, and 
do not make such good pets as gray 
squirrels. They are so restless in 
their habits and enjoy their liberty 
so much that it is cruel to shut 
them up in a cage. 

The chipmunk is a MAMMAL of 
the order rodentia , or gnawing ani¬ 
mals, and of the squirrel family. 

The word is sometimes written 
chipmonk and chipmuck. 

CHIPPING BIRD. See Spar¬ 
row. 

CHISEL. This is probably one of 
the most ancient of tools. Chisels of 
sharp FLINT have always been used 
by savages to cut wood, and in very 
early times bronze ones were made 
which would cut the hardest stone. 
The ancient Egyptians carved most 
of their granite monuments with 
copper or bronze chisels, which 
are said to have cut as well as the 
best steel chisels of the present day. 

Chisels are now made in many 
different forms, and for many kinds 
of work. Those used by sculptors, 
masons, and other workers in stone 



Ancient Bronze Chisels. 


are merely short pieces of steel with 
sharp edges. The tool is held in the 
left hand and is made to cut by strik¬ 
ing it on the end with a broad ham¬ 
mer called a mallet, made usually 
of wood. Blacksmiths and other 
iron workers use chisels much like 
those of stone cutters, for cutting off 
bars of iron and like work. 









CHLORINE 


129 


CHOCOLATE 


Carpenters’ and joiners’ chisels are 
much finer tools, and usually have 
handles. They are made out of bar 
iron by forging, or hammering it 
while hot, and the edge, of cast 
steel, is put in in the same way as 
the edge of an axe. Such chisels are 
made of many sizes, from an eighth 
of an inch up to several inches in 
width, and are used for different 
kinds of wood cutting and carving. 



Carpenter’s Chisel and Gouge. 


Dovetails, mortises, and other 
such work are usually cut with 
chisels. A kind of chisel with a 
rounded blade, used for cutting 
grooves and round places in wood, 
is called a gouge. The picture 
shows the form of the carpenter’s 
chisel and the gouge. 

The word chisel is from the old 
French ctsel, from ciseler , to cut. 

CHIVES. See Onion. 

CHLORINE, a simple substance, 
or ELEMENT, of a greenish-yellow 
color and a strong suffocating smell, 
of great value in the arts. In its 
common form it is a gas, but it may 
be made into a liquid under great 
pressure and cold. Chlorine is found 
in minerals, vegetables, and ani¬ 
mals, but always mixed with some¬ 
thing else. United with SODIUM, it 
forms the chloride of sodium, or 
common SALT, from which great 
quantities of chlorine are made. 
This is mixed with slaked lime to 
make chloride of lime, or bleaching 
powder, which is largely used for 
bleaching linen and cotton. Chlor¬ 
ide of lime is much used in hospitals, 
sick-rooms, and other ill-smelling 
places to purify the air. Unlike burnt 
paper, vinegar, and scents, which on¬ 
ly hide smells, chlorine destroys the 
substances which make them. 

When united with the metals and 


some other substances, chlorine 
forms an important class of SALTS 
called chlorides. United with hy¬ 
drogen, it makes hydrochloric or 
muriatic ACID. Chloral, used by phy¬ 
sicians to make nervous people sleep, 
is made of chlorine and alcohol. 

The word chlorine is from the 
Greek chloros , grass-green. 

CHLOROFORM, a colorless li¬ 
quid, of a peculiar smell and sweet¬ 
ish taste, much used in medicine to 
make people insensible to pain. 
When breathed it quickly puts one 
into so deep a sleep that a surgical 
operation may be suffered without 
feeling any pain. Chloroform is 
made up of CHLORINE, CARBON, 
and HYDROGEN. It is made by dis¬ 
tilling (see Alcohol) chloride of 
LIME, alcohol, and water. 

The word chloroform is made up 
of chloros , grass-green, and formyle , 
a substance named from the Latin 
formica , an ant, because it was first 
found in ants. 

CHOCOLATE, a paste made of 
the seeds of the cacao tree. The 
cacao tree, which grows in Central 
and South America and in the West 
India Islands, is an evergreen, 
usually three or four times as high 
as a man. It bears a fruit shaped 
like a thick, short cucumber, six to 
nine inches long and about half as 
wide. The skin is rough and 
warty ; the inside is a sweet pinkish- 
white pulp, used for food, which 
contains twenty to sixty seeds, about 
as large as almonds. These seeds, 
which are called cocoa beans, have 
a thin, brittle, reddish-brown husk 
and a dark-brown oily inside. 

In preparing cocoa beans for use 
they are first roasted like coffee 
beans. They are then bruised and 
winnowed or cleaned of the husks. 
The husks which are thus parted 
are the “ cocoa shells” of commerce, 
and the beans, broken into pieces, 
are called “cocoa nibs.” This is 
the purest form in which cocoa 
comes. The paste made by grind¬ 
ing the nibs alone is properly called 











CHURCH 


130 


CHURCH 


cocoa, and that made by grinding 
them with other substances and fla¬ 
vors, chocolate. Pure cocoa is made 
up of nearly one quarter STARCH and 
gum, about one fifth gluten, and a 
little more than one half oil. The 
oil, which is called “ butter of 
cacao,” is used in making soap, 
candles, pomades, and ointments. 
When the oil is pressed out of cocoa 
the flour which remains is made into 
an inferior article called “broma,” 
which is not so rich as chocolate. 

The chocolate sold in the stores 
is made of cocoa ground up with 
other substances, among which are 
sugar, molasses, honey, gum, 
starch, oatmeal, rice, flour, sago, 
and arrow-root, and spices and fla¬ 
vors, such as cinnamon, cloves, va¬ 
nilla, etc. The mixture is made into 
a paste and poured into moulds to 
harden. Chocolate is largely used 
as a drink and a food, and in mak¬ 
ing confectionery. 

The word chocolate is from the 
Aztec chocolatl , which is made up 
of the words choco , cacao, and latl, 
water. 

CHURCH, a building set apart for 
Christian worship. The early Chris¬ 
tians, who did not wish to build their 
churches like the dark and gloomy 
heathen temples, into which only the 
priests and not the people went, 
made them something like the Ro¬ 
man courts of justice named basili¬ 
cas , from which some churches are 
still called basilicas. The basilica was 
a large oblong room in which the 
officer called a praetor held his court, 
and its form was well fitted for a 
place of worship in which the people 
as well as the priests took part. 
The upper end was raised above the 
main floor by a few steps, and here 
divine service was carried on. The 
altar was put in the middle of this, 
the praetor’s seat became the bishop’s 
throne, and the priests were seated 
on a circular bench at the end. 

After a time changes were made : 
the raised part was built a little 
longer, and the side entrances were 


put at the end of a kind of hall on 
each side. This made the oblong 
basilica into the form of a cross, 
the shape in which most of the larg¬ 
est and finest churches are now built. 
The different parts of a church of 
this kind are shown in the picture. 
The long main part is usually di¬ 
vided into three parts by two rows 
of columns, which are marked by 
the rows of dots. The part between 
the columns in the lower part of 
the cross is called the nave (Latin 
navis, a ship), because it is supposed 
to look something like a ship ; and 



the parts between the columns and 
walls on each side, which are usually 
narrower and lower than the nave, 
the aisles (Latin ala, a wing), be¬ 
cause they are like the wings to a 
house. The upper limb of the 
cross, where the altar is, is the choir 
(Latin chorus, a band of singers), 
because the singers stood here, as 
they still do in some large churches. 
The choir sometimes has aisles, 
as shown in the picture. In small 
churches, where there are no aisles, 
the choir is usually called the chancel 
















CIDER 


CINNAMON 


131 


(Latin cancelli , a lattice), because it 
was formerly separated from the nave 
by a high lattice. The round end of 
the choir, which generally has an 
arched or rounded ceiling, often made 
of glass to admit light, is called the 
apse or apsis (Latin absis, an arch 
or dome). The two arms of the 
cross are called the transepts (Latin 
trails, across, and septum , an en¬ 
closure), because they cross the main 
body or nave of the church. The left 
transept is usually called the north 
transept and the right one the south 
transept, because the altar of the 
church is always supposed to be to¬ 
wards the East, or Holy Land, where 
Christ was buried. The square be¬ 
tween the transepts was generally 
lighted by a lantern or arched win¬ 
dow, but afterward the tower of the 
church was often built above this. 

In course of time other additions 
were made : a chapel was some¬ 
times built beyond the apse, and 
other small chapels along the aisles, 
vestry rooms for the use of the priests 
and singers were built outside the 
choir, and other buildings were erect¬ 
ed for various uses, until the once 
plain church grew into a collection of 
splendid structures, sometimes called 
a cathedral. A cathedral is properly 
the church where the bishop of a 
diocese officiates or performs the 
services, and is so called from the 
name of the bishop’s seat or throne, 
which is called the cathedra (Laiin 
cathedra , a chair or seat). 

The word church is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon circ, which is from the 
Greek kuriakon, the Lord’s house, 
from kurios , the Lord. 

CIDER, a drink made from the 
juice of apples. The apples should 
be ripe and mellow, because there is 
then more sugar in them and a bet¬ 
ter flavor than in green ones. They 
are first ground up into little pieces, 
and the pulp thus made, which is 
called the “ must,” is at once put 
into a cider press in layers folded in 
straw, which are called cheeses, and 
pressed. The juice runs into a tub, 


and, after being carefully strained, \s 
put into barrels, where it is allowed 
to ferment or work (see Beer), after 
which it may be drawn off into other 
casks or put into bottles. These 
must be kept tight or the cider will 
become sour and turn into vinegar. 

The word cider is from the French 
cidre , which is from the Greek 
sikera. 

CIGAR, a small bundle of pieces 
of tobacco leaf wrapped up in an 
envelope made of a single piece of 
sound leaf. The piece for the wrap¬ 
per is cut into a shape nearly like a 
quarter of orange-peel. It is laid 
flat on the table, and the edge of it 
is wet with a little gum water ; the 
small pieces of leaf are then laid on 
it and rolled up in it, the gummed 
edge of the wrapper sticking it tight. 
One end is pointed by twisting it 
with the fingers, and the other end is 
cut off square. 

The best cigars are made in Hav¬ 
ana, from tobacco raised in the is¬ 
land of Cuba; but many of those 
called Havanas are made in the 
United States. The cigars named 

cheroots, ’ ’ which are cut off square 
at each end, are made in the East 
Indies, chiefly at Manila in the Phil¬ 
ippine Islands, whence they are often 
called Manilas. 

A small cigar made of chopped 
up tobacco wrapped in a little piece 
of paper is called a cigarette (Span¬ 
ish cigarrito, little cigar). These 
are smoked much by Cuban and 
Spanish ladies. 

Cigar boxes are made of the wood 
of the Spanish cedar, which grows 
in the West Indies and Central 
America. 

The word cigar is from the Span¬ 
ish cigarro , the name given at first 
to a kind of tobacco raised in Cuba, 
but afterward to any tobacco made 
into a roll for smoking. 

CINNAMON, the inner bark of a 
tree growing chiefly in Ceylon, but 
also in China and South America. 
In Ceylon, where the best cinnamon 
is made, the trees are raised from 






CISTERN 


132 


CLAMP 


the seed in plantations. The bran¬ 
ches are cut when three to five years 
old and as large as a common cane, 
the outer bark scraped off, and the 
inner bark peeled off with a knife. 
The pieces are dried in the sun until 
they curl up into little rolls, when 
they are packed in bundles for mar¬ 
ket. The best cinnamon is taken 
from the tender shoots of the tree, 
and is almost as thin as paper. Cin¬ 
namon is used in medicine, cooking, 
perfumery, and confectionery. The 
oil of cinnamon is made from the 
leaves and fruit of the tree. What 
is called Chinese cinnamon is prop¬ 
erly cassia ; it is sometimes almost 
as good as tree cinnamon, and is 
often sold for it. 

The word cinnamon is from the 
Latin cinnamomum. 

CISTERN, a tank for holding 
water. Cisterns differ from wells in 
that they do not get their water 
from natural sources, such as 
springs, but through channels made 
by the hand of man. In hot coun¬ 
tries, where the supply of water is 
not regular, or where rain water is 
used, cisterns are necessary for stor¬ 
ing up water for future use. They 
are also largely used for the supply 
of locomotive boilers at railroad sta¬ 
tions. Cistern water used for drink¬ 
ing should always be filtered. 

The word cistern is from the 
Latin cisterna, from cist a, a box or 
chest. 

CITRON, the fruit of an evergreen 
tree of the same family with the 
lemon and the orange, which grows 
in the south of Europe and in the 
East. The fruit is shaped like a 
lemon, but is larger and has a 
rougher skin. The juice is used for 
the same purposes as that of the 
lemon, though it is not so sour. The 
peel preserved in sugar makes an 
excellent sweetmeat. From the 
outside of the peel and the leaves is 
made oil of citron, used by per¬ 
fumers. Citric ACID is sometimes 
made from the pulp of the fruit, and 
extracts are made from the seeds 


and from the bark of the roots and 
used for medicine. 

The word citron is from the Greek 
kitr on. 

CLAM, the common name of sev¬ 
eral kinds of shell fish. The hard 
clam, called by the Indians quahaug, 
has a round and thick shell, and the 
soft clam, which is longer than it is 
broad, has a thin shell. Both kinds 
belong in salt water, and are largely 
used for food. They also make 
good bait for fishing, especially soft 
clams, which are salted in barrels 
for the cod and haddock fisheries. 
Soft clams are dug up along the sea¬ 
shore, where they lie in beds buried 
in soft mud or sandy gravel about a 
foot deep. They make little holes 
in the sand up to the surface, 
through which they reach with their 
long tubes towards the water when 
the tide is high, and take in food. 
They often spirt water up through 
these holes. Hard clams are found 
in soft mud nearer the surface. The 
Indians used to make their wam¬ 
pum, which passed among them for 
money, out of their shells. 

The clam is an animal of the 
sub-kingdom of mollusks, and of the 
class of acephalous or headless 
MOLLUSKS. 

The word clam is from the old 
English clamp, meaning a thing 
which clasps together, like the two 
parts of the shell. 

CLAMP, an instrument made to 
screw up, so as to hold work in 



place, much used by cabinet ma¬ 
kers, joiners, and carriage makers. 
Clamps used by cabinet and car- 















CLAPBOARD 


133 


CLAY 


riage makers are made of iron, and 
have but one screw, as shown in 
the first picture. Carpenters’ and 
joiners’ clamps are usually of hard 



wood, and have two screws, as in 
the second picture. These are also 
called hand-screws. 

The word clamp is old English, 
and means a thing which clasps 
together. 

CLAPBOARD, a narrow board 
commonly used for covering the 
sides of wooden buildings. Clap¬ 
boards are usually of white pine, 
and are made much thinner on one 
edge than on the other, so that when 
nailed on to each other one can lap 
a little over the one next below it. 
This makes the covering of the build¬ 
ing much tighter than if the boards 
were only set together one above 
the other, and keeps the rain from 
driving in. Clapboards are sawn 
out of solid logs, not by sawing 
them clear through, as in making 
common boards, but by sawing from 
the outside to the middle or heart of 
the log. They are thus made thicker 
on the outside than on the inside. 
They are afterward smoothed in a 
planing machine. 

CLARET, a name given in Great 
Britain and the United States to all 
the red wines of the Bordelais, or 
country around Bordeaux. But this 
use of the word is unknown in 
France, those wines being called 
there either Bordeaux wines or by 
the names of the places on which 


they are grown. Common red wine 
is called vin ordinaire in France. 

The word claret is from the French 
clairet , which means clear or clari¬ 
fied. 

CLARINET or CLARIONET, a 

wind musical instrument, made of 
wood, used in orchestras and bands. 
It is usually of box, ebony, or cocoa, 
and has holes and keys for the fingers 
of the player. The tone is made by a 
thin piece of reed, which vibrates or 
trembles, when the player blows into 
the mouthpiece at the small end of 
the instrument. In fulness of tone, 
the clarinet is the most perfect of 
wind instruments, but as it cannot 
be played in every key in music, 
several of different kinds are used in 
an orchestra. 

The word clarinet is from the 
French clarinette, which comes from 
the Latin clarus, clear, and the in¬ 
strument is so named from its clear 
tone. 

CLAY, a kind of earth made up of 
alumina (aluminum oxide) and sil¬ 
ica (see Silicon). But pure clay is 
seldom found, it being generally 
mixed with iron, lime, magnesia, 
and other things. It is of many 
colors, white, yellow, red, brown, 
and blue or slate color, and is usually 
found packed closely in solid beds. 
When mixed with water, clay is easily 
made into a kind of putty or dough, 
and this is what gives it its great value 
in the arts. Among its most im¬ 
portant uses are the making of bricks 
and of pottery and porcelain. Com¬ 
mon clay, used for bricks, drain-tiles, 
and coarse pottery, is a mixture of 
clay and sand, with iron (iron oxide) 
enough in it to make it burn red. 
But some brick clay has so little iron 
in it that it burns yellow, like Mil¬ 
waukee brick. Clay mixed with 
much LIME is called marl. Potter’s 
clay has usually a little iron and lime 
in it, and generally burns dark red. 
It is used for coarse earthenware, 
such as flower pots, etc., and is the 
clay used by sculptors for modelling. 
Pipe clay, so called because clay 














CLOCK 


134 


CLOCK 


pipes are made from it, is a purer 
kind of potter’s clay. Fine stone¬ 
ware is made of it. Fire clay is used 
for crucibles, stove-linings, and fire¬ 
bricks, because it is very hard to 
melt. It is usually found under coal 
beds. The finest kind of clay, used 
for making porcelain or china, is 
called kaolin, from Kao-ling, the 
name of a hill in China whence the 
clay for Chinese porcelain is taken. 
It is white or creamy-yellow, and is 
softer and more crumbly than other 
kinds of clay. Good kaolin is found 
in many parts of Europe, and, in the 
United States, in Vermont, Dela¬ 
ware, South Carolina, Georgia, and 
other States. When taken from the 
bed, it looks much like MORTAR. 
It is first mixed with water and run 
through several vats, in which the 
coarse particles settle, and the milky 
liquid is then drawn into a shallow 
vat where the finer parts sink to the 
bottom. When clear, the water is 
drawn off and the kaolin is then 
dried, when it looks like fine white 
flour. 

The word clay is from the Anglo- 
Saxon clcegy sticky earth. 

CLOCK, a machine for measuring 
time. The ancients had no clocks 
like ours. They measured time at 
first by means of shadows, cast by 
the sun on an instrument called a 
sun-dial. The shape of a sun-dial 
can be seen in the first picture, 
which shows one fastened to the 
side of a wall. It is made of two 
parts, the dial-plane, on which the 
figures are, and the style, or little 
slanting rod on a peg in the middle, 
and fastened at the top of the dial- 
plane. The figures mark the hours 
of the day, like the figures on a 
clock-face, but they are arranged 
differently. The time is told by 
the shadow of the style which the 
sun casts on the dial-plane. In the 
picture the shadow lies half way 
between XII and I, so the time is 
about half past twelve. Of course, 
the dial would not show the time in 
a cloudy day. There were also 


moon-dials, to tell the time at 
night. 

Afterward they used a kind of 
water clock called clepsydra (water 
stealer, from Greek kleptein , to steal, 
and udor , water), which was a vase 
filled with water, with a small open¬ 
ing in the bottom through which the 
water dripped drop by drop into a 
vessel beneath, which was thus said 
to steal the water. The side of the 
vase was divided into spaces by lines, 
and the height of the water in it 
marked the time. Instruments like 
our hour-glasses were also used, in 
which the time was measured by the 
running out of sand. King Alfred 



the Great is said to have marked 
time by the gradual burning down 
of candles colored in rings. When 
wheel and weight clocks were first 
made is not known, but they were 
in use in the eleventh century. The 
pendulum (Latin pendere, to hang), 
or little weight which hangs below 
the works of the clock and swings 
backward and forward, was used 
first about 1657. 

There are two kinds of clocks— 
spring clocks, in which the wheels 
are moved by power from the uncoil¬ 
ing of a coiled spring, and which 
will be told about in the article 
Watch, and pendulum clocks, 



















CLOCK 


135 


CLOCK 


which are moved by the gradual fall¬ 
ing of a weight, the falling being 
regulated by the swinging of a pen¬ 
dulum. When a pendulum is set 
swinging it makes each swing back¬ 
ward and forward in just the same 
time until it stops, no matter whether 
the swing is over a long or a short 
space. Its swing is over a longer 
space at first than toward the last, 
when it is about to stop, but it goes 
faster, so that the time of the swing 
is always equal. This is called the 



“ isochronism” (equal time, from 
Greek isos, equal, and chronos , time) 
of the pendulum. 

The movement of a clock may be 
understood by looking at the second 
picture. The works are made up of 
what is called a “ train” of wheels, 
in which the wheel that moves the 
one next to it is moved by the one 
that goes before it. In the common 
eight-day clock there are usually 
four cog wheels, or wheels with 


teeth, in the train, marked a, b, d, 
and f, in the picture. The axle or 
spindle on which a wheel turns is 
called an 44 arbor when the arbor 
is made with teeth or cogs around its 
edge, as in c , e , and g, it is called a 
“ pinion.” The cogs around the 
pinions are called ” leaves,” and 
those around the large wheels, 
“teeth.” The string of the weights 
is twined around the arbor of the 
wheel a. Now, the weight pulls so 
heavily downward that it would fall 
until it untwined all the string from 
the arbor if there was not something 
to stop it. This is prevented by mak¬ 
ing the teeth of the wheel a fit into 
the leaves of the pinion c, so that it 
can turn round only just as fast as c 
does. The pinion c being made fast 
to the second wheel b turns it, and b, 
whose teeth fit into the leaves of the 
pinion e, causes the wheel d to turn 
the pinion g, which is fastened to 
the wheel f , called the 4 4 escape¬ 
ment wheel,” and causes it to turn 
with it. 

The “escapement” is one of the 
most important parts of a clock, be¬ 
cause it connects the train of wheels 
with the pendulum and gives it the 
power which keeps it swinging. If 
it were not for the escapement the 
clock would run down with an even 
motion and would not keep good 
time ; but the escapement and the 
pendulum change this even motion 
into another kind of motion, in 
which the train of wheels moves in 
a series of little leaps or jerks. 
These jerks, which may be seen in 
the movement of the minute hand 
and heard in the ticking of the clock, 
are caused by the swing of the pen¬ 
dulum, and are therefore made in 
equal time, as told before. In the 
third picture a is the escapement 
wheel, b the regulator, marked x in 
the second picture, and c the pen¬ 
dulum rod. When the pendulum 
swings to the left, the pointed end 
of the regulator d, which is called 
a pallet, slips out from under the 
tooth e of the escapement wheel, 













CLOCK 


136 


CLOCK 


which is moving from left to right, 
and at the same time the pallet f 
catches the tooth o. The pendu¬ 
lum then swings to the right, when 
the pallet f lets go of the tooth 0 
and the pallet d catches another 
tooth next beyond the tooth e, and 
so on around the whole wheel. Thus 
by the swinging of the pendulum 
the escapement wheel, and through 
it all the other wheels which, as 
shown in the second picture, are con¬ 
nected with it and are kept going 
by the power of the falling weight, 
are made to turn regularly by little 
jerks, each of which is made in just 
the same time. The escapement 
wheel usually has thirty teeth, and 



as one of these teeth escapes from 
the pallets of the regulator at every 
full swing of the pendulum, that is, 
every swing backward and forward, 
which takes two seconds of time, it 
follows that the escapement wheel 
will go round once in twice thirty 
seconds, or one minute. The teeth 
of the other wheels are so made that 
the wheel b will go round once in an 
hour, and it is therefore used to 
move the minute hand. The hour 
hand is moved by other wheels 
which are connected with a pinion 
on the other side of the pinion c, 
and which turns round once in twelve 
hours. The second picture shows 


the back of the wheels. The pen¬ 
dulum swings in front of them, and 
the hands and the clock face, on 
which the hours are marked, are in 
front of it. 

Town clocks and church clocks 
are made to move by trains of 
wheels in much the same way, but 
the wheels are very large and 
strong, and the weights and pendu¬ 
lums very heavy. It is very hard 
work to wind up a church clock, and 
it needs a strong man to do it. In 
winding up the clock in the tower of 
Trinity Church, New York, the 
crank or handle has to be turned 
round 850 times. Many wonderful 
clocks have been made, in some of 
which the machinery moved figures 
of men and animals in a very curious 
way. At Heidelberg, in Germany, 
was formerly a town clock, which, 
whenever it struck the hour, caused 
the figure of an old man to pull off 
his hat, while a cock crowed and 
clapped his wings, and soldiers 
fought with one another. This clock 
was destroyed by the French when 
they burned Heidelberg in 1693. 
There is another curious clock at 
Lyons, in France. When the time 
comes for striking the hour, two 
horsemen meet and beat the time on 
each other. A door then opens and 
the Virgin Mary comes out with 
Christ in her arms; and while two 
trumpeters blow on their trumpets, 
the Magi, or wise men of the East, 
march by with their followers in pro¬ 
cession, and present gifts. But the 
most wonderful clock is that in the 
Strasburg cathedral, which shows 
the proper motions of the sun and 
all the planets, and marks not only 
the hours and minutes, but the years 
and months, and all the feast days 
and other important days of the year. 
There are also many figures which 
are moved by its machinery. In the 
upper part of the clock are the sta¬ 
tues of four old men, who strike the 
quarter-hours. Death comes out at 
each quarter to strike, but Christ, 
with a spear in his hand, drives him 






CLOTH 


137 


CLOUDS 


back; but when the last quarter 
comes Christ goes inside and Death 
comes out and strikes the hour with 
a bone in his hand, and then the 
chimes sound. 

The word clock is from the Anglo- 
Saxon clucge. 

CLOTH. If you look closely at a 
piece of plain cotton cloth you will 
see that it is made up of two sets of 
threads, one of which runs length¬ 
wise, and the other across the cloth. 
Those which run lengthwise, or the 
long threads, are called the “ warp,” 
and the short ones which cross them 
the ‘ 4 woof ” or “ weft. ’ ’ Every 
kind of cloth has a warp and a weft; 
but they are woven together in many 
different ways. 

To begin to make a piece of cloth 
the weaver first streches out all the 
warp threads on the LOOM side by 
side, arranging them over the yarn 
beam at one end and the cloth beam 
at the other, so that as they unwind 
from the first they are wound up on 
the second. The fineness or coarse¬ 
ness of the cloth depends on the 
size of the threads and the distance 
between them, and the width of the 
cloth on the number of* the threads. 
The kind of cloth depends on the 
way in which the weft threads are 
woven into the warp. In plain 
cloth, like common cotton or linen, 
the weft is passed over the first 
warp thread, under the second, over 
the third, under the fourth, and so on 
across the piece. In twilled cloth, 
like satin, tweed, cassimere, and 
bombazine, the weft does not pass 
over and under each alternate 
thread, but over two threads and 
under one, over three and under 
one, or over four or five and under 
one, etc. In some kinds of satin even 
fifteen threads are passed over at 
once. All twilled cloths have a kind 
of stripe running diagonally or cor¬ 
ner-wise across them, which are 
made by this way of weaving in the 
weft threads. In pile cloths, or those 
which have a nap or surface of 
threads standing up, like VELVET, 


velveteen, and Wilton and velvet 
CARPETS, other threads are woven 
in with the weft so as to make loops 
over wires. These loops are cut and 
the ends are then sheared evenly, 
leaving the surface a soft, smooth, 
beautiful nap. Figured cloths, like 
damask and brocade, are made by 
weaving patterns in among the warp 
and the weft, either by the same or 
by other threads. 

Figured cloths are also made by 
weaving with different colored yarns. 
In mixed goods the warp is of one 
color and the weft of another; in 
striped cloths the warp threads are 
of two or more different colors; 
and in checked patterns, both the 
warp and the weft are of two colors, 
one set of stripes crossing another. 

The word cloth is from the Anglo- 
Saxon clddh , a garment. 

CLOUDS, bodies of watery vapor 
seen high in the air. Dampness in 
the AIR remains invisible—that is, 
unseen—until the air becomes sat¬ 
urated with it, or so filled with it 
that it cannot hold any more, when 
it falls as dew or rain, or turns to 
FOG and clouds. The amount of 
dampness which the air can hold 
depends upon the heat. When the 
air is warm the watery vapor is ex¬ 
panded, or made thin, and is carried 
off into the higher parts of the air; 
but when it is cool it is condensed, 
or made thick and heavy, and then 
we can see it. When the air has 
not too much dampness for the 
amount of heat in it, it is clear, and 
we can see the bright blue sky ; 
when it has a little too much it is 
filled with fleecy clouds ; and when 
it has altogether too much the clouds 
become dark • and heavy and at last 
fall as rain. 

There are four kinds of clouds, 
called cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and 
nimbus. Cirrus clouds (Latin cir¬ 
rus , a lock of hair) are of feathery 
form, like locks or curls of hair, 
spread out all over the sky or ar¬ 
ranged in narrow stripes. They are 
the lightest and highest of all the 





CLOVES 


138 


COAL 


clouds, being often seen in summer 
far above other clouds. When they 
change much in a few hours they 
denote windy weather. Sailors call 
them mares’ tails or cats’ tails. 
Cumulus clouds (Latin cumulus , a 
heap or pile) are the great piles of 
white-topped clouds seen in summer 
days. As the sun becomes warmer 
the moisture in these clouds becomes 
thinner and lighter and they rise 
higher in the air ; but towards night¬ 
fall they generally grow smaller and 
vanish with the sunset. If they in¬ 
crease and grow darker in the even¬ 
ing, rain usually follows. Stratus 
clouds (Latin stratus , spread out) are 
those ‘which are stretched out in 
sheets, layers, or bands. They lie 
much nearer the earth than other 
clouds, and often creep along valleys 
in the shape of mist or fog, going 
away with the coming of day. These 
clouds are seen mostly at night and 
in the winter. Nimbus clouds (Latin 
nimbus , a rain-cloud) are the proper 
rain clouds. They are heavy and 
threatening, black or gray, and with 
ragged edges. Snow and hail, as 
well as rain, sometimes fall from 
these clouds, which are seen in their 
most perfect form during thunder 
storms. 

The form and height of clouds 
vary with the amount of dampness 
in the air, the height and course of 
winds, the height of land, the extent 
of land and sea, the climate, the sea¬ 
son, etc. From clouds comes the 
rain which gives moisture to plants, 
and water to springs, rivers, and 
lakes. All kinds of clouds may 
sometimes be seen in one day, and 
the various kinds are often mingled 
together. 

The word cloud comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon clUd , a hill, clouds often 
looking like hills. 

CLOVES, the dried flower buds of 
a kind of myrtle tree, which grew 
first in the Molucca Islands, in the 
Indian Archipelago. The tree, which 
grows four or five times as high as a 
man, is an evergreen and very beau¬ 


tiful. It has a straight trunk, with 
smooth bark, which branches about 
half way up ; the branches grow 
smaller toward the top, so that when 
covered with leaves they form a 
pyramid of green. The flower buds 
are picked before they begin to open, 
and dried in the shade. The little 
ball at the end of the clove is the 
flower folded up. 

Cloves are used as a seasoning in 
cookery. The oil of cloves is largely 
used in making perfumery, and is 
sometimes given by physicians as a 
medicine. If cloves be chewed be¬ 
fore taking bad-tasting medicines, 
such as castor oil and cod liver oil, 
the medicines will not taste bad. 

Cloves are now raised in Sumatra, 
Zanzibar, Mauritius, the West In¬ 
dies, and Brazil, but the best are 
brought from the Moluccas, where 
the tree grows better than anywhere 
else. 

The word cloves comes from the 
Latin word clavus, a nail, and the 
spice is so called because it looks 
like little nails. The Dutch call it 
kruydnagel , nail-spice. 

COAL. There was a time in the 
early history of the earth when all 
parts of its surface had a very hot 
climate ; even the Arctic regions, 
where now is frost and ice all the 
year round, being much like the 
middle of Africa. There were then 
no changes in heat and cold, but the 
same heat existed in all parts, and 
the same kinds of plants grew all 
over the globe. These plants were 
of immense size and grew so thickly 
that they made a dense forest every¬ 
where. There were then no animals 
on the land, and only a few fishes 
and mollusks in the sea. Most of 
the plants were of the lower kinds, 
such as lichens, fungi (see Fun¬ 
gus), MOSSES, SEAWEEDS, FERNS, 
and cone-bearing trees, and there 
were no flowers and no fruits fit for 
eating. For thousands of years 
these great forests of plants grew up 
and died, and were followed by other 
plants, until the swamps and low 





COAL 


139 


COAL 


lands became filled up with thick 
closely packed beds of vegetable 
matter. 

At this time the crust of the earth 
was not very strong, and it might 
happen that parts of it would sink so 
that some of these great beds of 
vegetable matter were brought un¬ 
der water. Then the matter would 
partly rot and become packed so 
closely that it would turn into PEAT. 
In time heat and pressure would 
cause a second change, and the peat 
would turn into a kind of brown coal 
called lignite. A third change 
would turn this brown coal into real 
coal. Thus coal is made up of the 
remains of trees and plants which 
grew on the earth before man or any 
other animal had appeared. Changed 
by pressure, heat, and dampness, 
this mass of vegetable matter has 
become a kind of CARBON, mixed up 
with bitumen or the tarry sub¬ 
stances which are always made by 
the slow decay of such matter. 

Coal is thus made up of carbon 
mixed with bitumen, and the kind 
of coal depends on the amount of 
bitumen in it. It is commonly di¬ 
vided into three classes : anthra¬ 
cite or stone coal, sometimes called 
glance coal on account of its shine, 
which has the least bitumen in it; 
bituminous coal, which has in it 
much more bitumen than anthracite ; 
and cannel coal, which has in it the 
most bitumen of all. Of these 
coals, the anthracite is harder and 
closer-grained and has less bitumen 
in it than the others because it has 
had more pressure and more heat. 
If it had had still greater heat and 
pressure, it would have undergone 
another change and become plum¬ 
bago or BLACK LEAD. 

In the article Rocks is told that 
coal is usually found in seams or lay¬ 
ers, with rocks on top of it. The 
seams vary from one inch to thirty 
feet in thickness, and the rocks be¬ 
tween them are generally sandstone 
and a slaty kind of rock called shale. 
Taken altogether these layers or 


seams are called “ coal measures ;” 
and the coal measures together with 
the rocks under them, which are 
always limestone and old red sand¬ 
stone, form what is called the “ coal 
formation,” or the ‘‘carboniferous 
system.” 

The layers of the coal measures 
are not always straight and level, 
but are often slanting, or bent up at 
the ends, or hollow like a basin. 
When they bend up so that the coal 
seam comes to the surface of the 
ground, it is called an ‘‘outcrop.” 
Sometimes breaks are found in the 
seams: these are called ‘‘faults” 
or ‘ ‘ dykes, ’ ’ and are often a great 
trouble to the miner, who does not 
know which way to dig to find the 
coal again. When an outcrop is 
found, it is easy to mine the coal by 
digging into it a kind of tunnel, 
called an ‘‘adit” or ‘‘drift,” up 
which it is brought in cars ; but 
sometimes very deep pits must be 
dug to reach it. These pits, which 
are called ‘‘ shafts,” are sometimes 
more than a quarter of a mile deep, 
and pass through many seams. 
As each seam is reached a side pas¬ 
sage is cut into it, and from each 
side of this other passages are cut. 

There are many such passages 
through each seam, all connecting 
with each other, so that the coal 
seam is cut up into a kind of town 
with streets and lanes. As the coal 
is dug away the roof is propped up 
with strong posts and beams. The 
coal is sometimes dug out with picks 
and other tools, sometimes blasted 
with gunpowder, and sometimes cut 
into blocks by coal-cutting machines. 
It is hoisted from the mines through 
the shaft in iron boxes or cages by 
means of a rope or chain passing 
over a wheel at the top, which 
is worked by a steam engine. But 
in some of the largest mines tunnels 
lead from the surface down a grad¬ 
ual slant into the side of the hill, and 
the coal is brought up through them 
in cars, drawn sometimes by mules 
and sometimes by steam. The coal 







COBALT 


140 


COCHINEAL 


is then sorted into different sizes by- 
dumping it on to wire screens or 
sieves, when it is ready for shipment. 

Coal is one of the most valuable 
of the things got out of the earth, 
not only on account of its use as a 
fuel for warming houses, but for the 
making of steam, the smelting of 
metals, and other uses in the arts. 
From it we get the GAS which we 
use for lights, paraffine oil, and the 
many other useful products, includ¬ 
ing the beautiful aniline colors, which 
are made from coal tar. 

Coal is found in almost all parts of 
the world, but the largest coal fields 
are in the United States, where the 
States of Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, 
Kansas, West Virginia, Pennsylva¬ 
nia, and Ohio are especially rich in 
it. In Europe, Russia has the larg¬ 
est coal fields and Great Britain the 
next largest, but Great Britain mines 
more than half of all the coal which 
is dug in the world. 

The word coal is from the Anglo- 
Saxon col. 

COBALT, a METAL, and one of 
the ELEMENTS. When pure, cobalt 
is a hard white metal, which does 
not change at common heat, and 
which may easily be hammered 
when red hot. It is never found by 
itself, but generally united with 
NICKEL, ARSENIC, and SULPHUR. 
Cobalt is much used in the arts, 
chiefly to make fine colors. Smalt 
or azure blue is made by adding ox¬ 
ide of cobalt to melted glass, which, 
after cooling, is of a beautiful blue, 
and then grinding it to powder. 
Smalt is used for coloring pottery 
and porcelain, glass, enamels, tiles, 
and paper-hangings. Green, blue, 
and yellow paints are also made from 
cobalt. 

The word cobalt is from the Ger¬ 
man kobalt , from kobold , Greek 
kobalos, an elf or sprite, because 
miners looking for copper and silver 
used to think that the ores of cobalt, 
which they did not then know 
about, were put in their way by elves 
and sprites to deceive them. 


COCHINEAL, a dye stuff made 
from the dried bodies of insects. 
The cochineal insect is very small, 
there being about seventy thousand 
of them in a single pound of dried 
cochineal. The male is deep red and 
has light brown wings ; the female 
has no wings and is deep brown. In 
the picture the insect with wings is 
the male ; the two without wings 
show the female, the smaller one 
being the natural size, and the larger 
one the magnified. The insects feed 
on CACTUS plants, particularly on 
one called in Mexico nopal , which 
is something like the prickly pear. 
There are large plantations of nopal 
in Mexico, where the cochineal bugs 
are tended with the greatest care. 
Each female produces more than a 


W y 



Cochineal Insects. 

Male and Wingless Female—Natural 
Size and Enlarged. 

thousand eggs, and the young in¬ 
sects spread, as soon as they are 
hatched, all over the leaves of the 
plants, where they feed and swell up 
so that they look like little knobs. 
They are now gathered by being 
scraped off with a knife or brush, 
killed by boiling water or heat, and 
dried. There are but few males, 
and only the females are good for 
dyeing. When dried the insects look 
like little shrivelled grains. 

Beautiful scarlet and crimson dyes 
are made from cochineal, and also 
the artist’s colors called carmine and 
lake. It is used chiefly for dyeing 
silks and artificial flowers, and for 
making red ink and rouge. 











COCKROACH 


COCOANUT 


141 


The cochineal insect belongs to the 
order hemiptera , or half-winged in¬ 
sects. 

The word cochineal is from the 
Spanish cochinilla , from the Latin 
coccwn y a berry, the insect being 
once thought to be the seed of a plant. 

COCKROACH. There are sev¬ 
eral kinds of cockroaches ; those 
which have always lived in the 
United States are found in the woods, 
usually under stones, rotten logs, and 
fallen leaves, and seldom go into 
houses ; those which run around 
houses were brought from Asia in 
ships’ cargoes. Cockroaches eat 
both animal and vegetable food, and 
destroy even leather and clothing. 
They come out of their holes in the 
night in search of food, sometimes 
in swarms, and often spoil by their 



Croton Bug. 

Male. Female. 

bad smell what they do not eat; 
but they are also very useful, for they 
eat many bedbugs, of which they are 
very fond. They may be driven away 
by borax, which they do not like, 
or may be poisoned by a mixture of 
red lead with Indian meal and 
molasses. A small kind of cock¬ 
roach, abundant in houses in New 
York and Boston, are called Croton 
bugs. They are shown in the picture, 
the smaller one on the left being the 
male and the other the female. 

The cockroach belongs to the or¬ 
der orthopterciy or straight-winged 
insects. 

COCOANUT, the fruit of the co- 
coanut palm tree. The tree, which 


is found chiefly in the islands of the 
Pacific and Indian oceans, grows 
about two feet thick and sometimes 
a hundred feet high, or twice as 
high as a four-story house. It has 
no branches, but at the top is a 
crown of fifteen or twenty feather-like 
leaves, each twelve to twenty feet 
long, under which the nuts hang in 
bunches. A tree in full bearing will 
ripen eighty to a hundred cocoanuts 
every year. Each nut is enclosed 
in a thick soft husk. The shell of 
the nut is very hard when ripe. 
When it is green it is lined with a 
soft ALBUMEN like jelly, within 
which are from one to two pints of 
a clear liquid. When the nut ripens 
the albumen becomes hard and the 
liquid very sweet and sickish to the 
taste. 

The cocoanut is one of the most 
valuable trees in the world, nearly 
every part of it being useful to man. 
The young roots are chewed by the 
natives, and also woven into baskets. 
The trunk of the tree furnishes 
canoes, posts and rafters for houses 
and fences ; the young green shoots, 
which have a soft pith, are made into 
water pipes, and the old wood, which 
becomes very hard and takes a 
beautiful polish, and which is called 
porcupine wood, is used in cabinet 
work. The young leaves are cooked 
and eaten like cabbage ; the old 
leaves are made into cloth, hats and 
bonnets, baskets, lanterns, fans, 
bedding, thatch for houses, fish nets, 
writing paper, and many other 
things ; and the ribs of the leaves 
make paddles for boats, spears and 
arrows, brooms, combs, and torches. 
When burned, the leaves and wood 
furnish potash for soap. From 
the flowers is made a drink called 
“toddy,” which when fermented 
(see Beer) is called ‘‘palm wine.” 
Good vinegar is also made from it by 
more fermentation, and a fair sugar 
called “ jaggery” is made by boiling 
down the fresh toddy. Jaggery 
mixed with lime makes a strong 
cement. 




COD 


142 


COD 


The husk of the nut furnishes the 
fibre called “coir,” an excellent 
material for cordage, matting, mat¬ 
tresses, brushes, and brooms. Small 
cord made of this fibre is called 
“ sinnet,” and is used by the natives 
to tie pieces of wood together where 
we would use nails. The hard shell 
of the nuts takes a beautiful polish, 
and is made into ladles, cups, etc. ; 
when burnt it makes lampblack, and 
its charcoal is used for cleaning the 
teeth. 

When the nuts are green the pulp 
is good for eating and the liquid 
makes a refreshing drink ; the pulp 
is also eaten after it becomes hard, 
and is much used in cookery and in 
making confectionery. The old nuts 
produce cocoanut oil, used for cook¬ 
ing, for anointing the body, and for 


burning in lamps. It is sent to 
foreign countries, where it is made 
into stearine candles, toilet soap, 
marine soap (a kind of soap which 
will make a lather with salt water), 
and various ointments and hair 
dressings. 

The word cocoanut is made up of 
the Portuguese coco and the Eng¬ 
lish nut, Latin mix ; coco means an 
ugly mask, and the name is said to 
have been given to the cocoanut on 
account of its end, which looks some¬ 
thing like a monkey’s face. 

COD, a kind of fish. There are 
several kinds, the principal Amer¬ 
ican ones being the American cod, 
found on the coast from the Hudson 
to the St. Lawrence river, the Bank 
cod, from the coast of Maine to Lab¬ 
rador, and the tom cod, from New 



Cod. 


York to New Brunswick. The first 
two kinds sometimes weigh ninety 
to a hundred pounds each, or as 
much as a boy twelve years old. 
The kind shown in the picture is 
the Bank cod, which is the most 
common. 

The principal cod fishery is on 
the Grand Bank of Newfoundland, 
where English, French, and Amer¬ 
ican fishing vessels go every year ; 
but there are also very important 
fisheries off the coasts of Norway, 
Iceland, Holland, Scotland, and the 
Pacific coast of the United States. 
The Grand Bank of Newfoundland 
is the flat top of a kind of mountain 
which rises up out of the deep sea 
so as to make a vast rocky shoal, 
where the water is much shallower 


than in other places, and here the 
codfish find the best feeding and 
breeding places. There are also 
other banks along the coast, some 
west and some east of the Grand 
Bank, which the fish seem to like 
equally well. Cod are caught on 
these banks all the year round. 
Many are taken in nets, but the 
vessels from the United States fish 
mostly with “ trawls” and “ hand 
lines.” The trawl is a long line 
anchored at each end, with several 
hundred fish hooks fastened to it a 
little way apart, and so marked with 
buoys that it can easily be found 
and hauled up. The hooks are 
baited with pieces of herring, mack¬ 
erel, or squid, a kind of MOLLUSK ; 
but codfish are so greedy that they 






COD 


143 


COFFEE 


will bite at almost anything - . A fish 
is often found on every one of the 
hooks when a trawl line is taken up. 
Those who fish with hand lines, or 
single lines with two or three hooks 
on each, use salted clams for bait at 
first, but afterward catch squid and 
use them. While fishing, the ves¬ 
sel lies at anchor on the bank, and 
the fishermen go off from her in 
“dories,” a kind of flat-bottomed 
boat. When the dories are filled 
they go back to the vessel, and the 
fish are dressed and salted "away in 
the hold. The dressing is done 


very fast. A man called the 
“ throater” cuts the fish’s throat 
and rips it open, and passes it to 
the “ header,” who cuts off the 
head and takes out the entrails ; the 
“splitter” then splits it wide open 
and takes out a part of the back¬ 
bone, and the “ salter” piles the 
fish up and salts it. When the ves¬ 
sel arrives home the fish are taken 
out of the hold, washed, and dried 
on platforms or under sheds on the 
shore. The sun and the wind soon 
dry them, and give them the white, 
bleached look which salt codfish 



Drying Codfish at Newfoundland. 


usually have. Great numbers of 
cod are also cured on the shore at 
Newfoundland, mostly by British 
and Canadian fishermen. They are 
dried in long sheds, or hung up on 
frames, as shown in the picture. 

In cleaning codfish, the livers and 
the sounds and tongues are saved. 
The livers are put into oak tanks 
and pressed to get out the oil, which 
is much used as a medicine for con¬ 
sumption, scrofula, and other dis¬ 
eases. The first oil pressed out, 
which is the kind used in medicine, 
is clear and light-colored ; but the 


livers soon begin to putrify or spoil, 
and the second run of oil is pale 
brown ; finally the livers are boiled 
in water, and a dark brown oil is got 
from them. The tongues of the fish 
and the sounds, or air-bladders, are 
salted in barrels. They are esteemed 
a delicacy ; and ISINGLASS is some¬ 
times made from the sounds. In 
some places fish guano or manure 
is made from the heads and entrails 
of the fish, but they are usually 
thrown overboard. 

COFFEE. The coffee berry is the 
seed of a tree which grows wild 











COFFEE 


144 


COIN 


in Africa and Asia. This tree is 
sometimes four or five times as high 
as a man, but it is usually kept 
down by cutting to a height of 
about five feet, or a little lower than 
a man, so that the berries can be 
easily picked. The plant is raised 
from the seed in nurseries, and when 
one year old is set out in the planta¬ 
tions. It begins to bear when three 
years old, and will yield for more 
than twenty years. The leaves are 
evergreen and never change, and 
the tree blossoms and bears fruit 
almost all the time, flowers and ripe 
fruit being seen on the tree at the 
same time ; but the seeds are gath¬ 
ered usually only twice or three 
times a year. 

The fruit looks like a cherry, and 
is red when ripe, but finally turns 
dark purple. It is sweet and good 
to eat. Each one contains two 
seeds, or coffee beans, which lie 
with their flat sides to each other 
and are held together by a tough 
skin which covers them. When ripe 
the fruit is gathered and dried, 
and the outer part is easily re¬ 
moved by hand or by being rolled 
under wooden rollers. The seeds 
are then dried again, the tough skin 
around them is broken by other 
rollers, and after the chaff and light 
husks have been cleaned from them 
the coffee beans are ready for mar¬ 
ket. 

Coffee is said to have been used 
in Persia about a thousand years 
ago, but it has been known in 
Europe only about three hundred 
years. The first coffee house in Lon¬ 
don was opened in 1652, or thirty 
years after the Pilgrims came to 
New England. Coffee was first 
brought to America about a hun¬ 
dred and fifty years ago (1720 to 
172$) by Captain Desclieux of the 
French navy. He thought that it 
would grow in America as well as 
in the East Indies, where the Dutch 
were then raising it, so when he 
was about to sail for Martinique, in 
the West Indies, he got three coffee * 


plants from the *Jardin des Plants 
(Garden of Plants) in Paris. The 
voyage was long and stormy, and 
the supply of water nearly gave out. 
Captain Desclieux, who, like all 
others on the ship, had but a very 
little each day to drink, divided his 
with his coffee plants, and, though 
two died, one arrived safe at Marti¬ 
nique. It was at once planted and 
great care taken of it, and from it 
have come all the coffee plants grow¬ 
ing in America. 

The principal countries where 
coffee is raised are Brazil, Java, 
Sumatra, India, Ceylon, Arabia, 
Abyssinia, Central America, the 
West Indies, Venezuela, the United 
States of Colombia, and Peru. The 
best and most fragrant coffee is 
Mocha, which is raised in the south¬ 
west part of Arabia ; but most of the 
coffee sold under the name of 
Mocha comes from India, Africa, 
and Brazil. Java coffee, considered 
the next best, comes from the islands 
of Java and Sumatra and other parts 
of the East Indies. Much Brazilian 
coffee is sold as Java. Indeed, more 
than half the coffee used in the world 
is raised in Brazil. Maracaibo cof¬ 
fee comes from Venezuela and coun¬ 
tries near there. 

The word coffee is from the Turk¬ 
ish kahveh , and the plant is sup¬ 
posed to have got its name from 
Kaffa, a part of Abyssinia, where it 
grows wild. 

COIN, a piece of metal stamped 
with a DIE and used for money. 
Coins are always made by the gov¬ 
ernments of the countries where they 
are issued, in order that the quality, 
weight, and size of each kind may be 
exactly alike. Their manufacture 
requires the greatest care and skill, 
and very fine and costly machinery. 
Almost all coins are made of an AL¬ 
LOY or mixture of metals. In the 
United States gold and silver are 
alloyed with copper, because when 
pure they are too soft to wear well. 
The metals are first melted together 
1 and run into ingots, or small bars 





COIN 


145 


COKE 


about a foot long, an inch or two 
wide, and a half inch thick. These 
ingots are then rolled out into rib¬ 
bons of the right thickness for the 
coin to be made, by passing them 
several times between heavy steel 
rollers, driven by a steam engine. 
The ribbons are next drawn through 
a steel gauge to straighten them, 
and to make them of exactly the 
same thickness, when they are ready 
for the cutting press. In this 
machine a punch, which works up 
and down into a round hole in a 
steel plate, cuts the ribbons up into 
round pieces called blanks or plan- 
chets, of the proper size for mak¬ 
ing the coins. The planchets are 
now passed through the milling 
machine, by which the edge of each 
one is crowded up into a rim or 
border. This is a little higher than 
the figures on the face of the coin, 
and protects them from being rubbed 
as much as they would be if it were 
perfectly flat. 

The planchets are now cleaned by 
putting them into weak hot sul¬ 
phuric acid, washing them in water, 
and drying them in sawdust, and are 
then ready for stamping or coining. 
The coining press is a very powerful 
machine, worked by a steam engine, 
which stamps out a coin with a single 
blow, by forcing the upper DIE down 
on to the lower or counter die. The 
counter die is fastened firmly on a 
strong bed plate, and a kind of ring, 
called the collar, is put over it. The 
collar, which comes up just far 
enough above the face of the counter 
die to hold the coin when the upper 
die is pressed down, has its inner side 
notched all round. The planchets 
are put by hand into a kind of hop¬ 
per or tube in front of the machine, 
from which they are taken by little 
finger-like pieces of steel called feed¬ 
ers, and carried one by one into the 
collar. As each piece comes in, the 
upper die is forced down on it and 
crowds it on to the counter die, 
stamping it at once on both sides 
and forcing its edges into the notches 


around the collar. These notches 
make what is commonly called the 
milling on the edge of the coin, which 
is intended to prevent the clipping 
or filing down of the edges, because 
such filing would show on the mill¬ 
ing. In old times, when coins were 
made with smooth edges, this was 
much done by dishonest persons, 
who got a good deal of gold and 
silver by clipping a large number of 
coins. 

As soon as the coin is stamped 
the action of the machine raises the 
upper die, and the feeders, coming 
up with a second planchet, push the 
finished piece out. The coins are 
carefully looked over to see that all 
are perfect, and they are then counted 
and put into bags. 

The coins of the United States 
are made at the Mint in Philadel¬ 
phia, and at the branch mints in New 
Orleans, San Francisco, Carson City, 
and Denver. Those coined in Phila¬ 
delphia have no mint mark on them, 
but those coined in New Orleans have 
an O on the reverse below the eagle, 
those coined at San Francisco an S, 
those coined at Carson City, C C, 
and those coined at Denver a D. 

The word coin is from the French 
coin , which is from the Latin cuneus , 
a wedge or die with which money is 
stamped. It is probable that the 
first stamping was done with a 
wedge. 

COKE. There are two kinds of 
coke—gas coke, which is told about 
in the article Gas, and coke which 
is made in heaps or ovens. Coke is 
charred bituminous coal, just as 
CHARCOAL is charred wood ; and it 
consists only of CARBON mixed with 
some earthy matters. When it is 
charred in heaps the coal is piled up 
in a stack, which is sometimes round 
and sometimes oblong, with open¬ 
ings left for the air. Fire is then set 
to it, and it is allowed to burn until 
smoke no longer rises from it. The 
air holes are then stopped by cover¬ 
ing the heap with coal dust, and the 
coke is left to cool. During the burn- 





COLOGNE 


146 


COLUMN 


ing, smoke, watery vapor, coal gas, 
and coal tar are given off, and the 
remainder is coke. A better way to 
make coke is to char the coal in great 
ovens built of firebrick for the pur¬ 
pose. The coal is put in at the top, 
and a little air let in at openings in 
the front. As soon as the smoky 
vapor ceases to pass off, the oven is 
closed tight and allowed to cool for 
a day. The coke is then raked out, 
and if still afire the fire is put out 
with water. 

Coke is lighter than coal, and por¬ 
ous, or full of little holes. When 
used as a fuel it makes a great and 
steady heat without smoke, and 
leaves but little ashes. It is largely 
used in Europe, where anthracite 
coal is lacking, in furnaces for smelt¬ 
ing metals and in furnaces where 
smoke is not wanted. In England 
it is burned in locomotives on most 
of the railways. 

The word coke comes from the 
Latin coquere, to cook or bake. 

COLOGNE, or COLOGNE WA¬ 
TER, alcohol perfumed with essen¬ 
tial OILS. It is made of many dif¬ 
ferent things and in several ways. 
The best cologne is said to be a mix¬ 
ture of balm and mint, petals of 
roses and violets, lavender flowers, 
absinth, sage, thyme, orange flow¬ 
ers, nutmeg, mace, cloves, cinna¬ 
mon, camphor, and other things dis¬ 
tilled with ALCOHOL. Some is made 
without distillation, but it is not so 
good. Most of the cologne sold in 
the shops is a cheap imit ation of real 
cologne. 

Cologne is so named because it 
was first made in Cologne, on the 
Rhine. The French call it eau de 
Cologne , Cologne water. 

COLUMN, a pillar or post for hold¬ 
ing up a roof, gallery, etc. The 
parts of a column may be seen in the 
picture, which shows a column, its 
pedestal or the part on which it 
stands, and the entablature or part 
which it holds up. The pedestal is 
made up of the plinth, the dado or die, 
and the cornice, and the entablature 


of the architrave, the frieze, and the 
cornice. The column itself is in 
three parts—the base or lowest part, 
the shaft or middle part, and the 
capital or top part. The Greeks had 
three kinds of columns, the Doric, 
the Ionic, and the Corinthian, all 
of which, excepting the Doric, had 
these three parts; the Doric had 



Corinthian Column, with Pedestal and En¬ 
tablature. 


no base, the shaft standing right on 
the pedestal. 

These three columns make the 
three styles or orders in Greek archi¬ 
tecture, which are named after them, 
the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corin¬ 
thian orders. The chief differences 
between them are in the capitals. 
The Doric capital, which was the 

























COMB 


147 


COMB 


first made, being very plain, the 
Ionic capital, which came next, be¬ 
ing more ornamented, and the Corin¬ 
thian capital the most highly or¬ 
namented of all. The idea of the Co¬ 
rinthian capital is said to have been 
got from a plant called acanthus, 
which has pointed prickly leaves. The 
story is that a young girl of Corinth 
died, and her nurse collected the arti¬ 
cles which she had loved, put them in 



Doric Capital. Ionic Capital. 


a basket on her grave, and laid a tile 
on top of it. By chance the basket 
was placed on the roots of an acan¬ 
thus plant, and this, sprouting in 
the spring, partly covered the basket 
with its leaves, some of which, reach¬ 
ing the tile, turned downward, as 
shown in the picture. An architect, 
named Callimachus, who happened 
to see it, was struck by its beauty, 
and thought it would make a fine 
capital for a column ; and by chang¬ 
ing it a little he made the Corinthian 
column, which thus got its name 
from Corinth. The shafts of all the 


Greek columns were fluted—that is, 
they were carved all around, from 
the base to the capital, in little hol¬ 
low channels called “ flutes.” 

The Romans added two other 
styles, the Tuscan, in which the col¬ 
umn was something like the Doric, 
but had a base, and the Composite, 
which was a mixture of the Ionic and 
the Corinthian. In Gothic architec¬ 
ture there are many beautiful kinds 



Basket and Acanthus Plant. 

of columns, often much decorated 
with leaves and flowers. 

In former times fine columns were 
always made of solid stone, gener¬ 
ally of marble or granite, but now 
many columns are made of cast 
iron. These are made to look on 
the outside like a stone column, but 
they are always cast hollow, because 
if solid they would be too heavy ; 
and a certain weight of metal cast 
in a hollow column is stronger than 
the same weight cast solid. 

The word column is from the 
Latin columna. 



Combs Cut with a Punch. 


COMB. Combs for dressing the 
hair have been in use from the most 
ancient times. The combs of the 
Egyptians, many of which have 
been found in tombs, were of wood, 
and usually had coarse teeth on one 
side and fine on the other. The 


combs of the Greeks and Romans 
were of boxwood. Combs are now 
made mostly of horn, ivory, and 
vulcanized India rubber. Orna¬ 
mental combs, worn by ladies, are 
often of gold, silver, and tortoise 
shell. 






































COMPASS 


148 


COMPASS 


In old times combs were made by 
cutting the teeth with a double saw, 
the blades of which were set as far 
apart as the thickness of the tooth to 
be cut. The teeth were afterward 
finished with thin files. By this 
means the material sawed out be¬ 
tween the teeth was wasted. But 
now combs are so made that the 
material between the teeth goes to 
make another comb. This is done 
by cutting them out with a kind of 
punch instead of sawing them. A 
plate of horn, tortoiseshell, or other 
material, comes apart when cut, and 
forms two combs, as shown in the 
picture, which need only filing and 
polishing. INDIA RUBBER combs 
are made by pressing soft rubber 
into moulds, and “vulcanizing” 
them afterwards. 

The word comb is from the Anglo- 
Saxon camb. 

COMPASS, the instrument by 
means of which sailors are able to 
steer their course on the ocean when 
neither the sun nor stars can be 
seen. If a magnetized (see Mag¬ 
net) needle be laid on a piece of 
cork floating in a bowl of water, one 
end of the needle will always point 
toward the north, and the other end 
toward the south. If you turn it 
around so that the north pole of the 
needle shall point toward the south, 
the cork will turn around in the 
water until the north pole of the nee¬ 
dle points toward the north again. 
It is just the same in the compass, 
where the needle is nicely balanced 
on a little pivot, so that it will turn 
around even more easily than the 
cork in the water. 

In the mariner’s compass the 
needle has a small piece of AGATE 
in its centre, with a hole part way 
through it, by means of which it is 
balanced on a fine steel pivot stand¬ 
ing in the middle of the compass box. 
On top of the needle is fastened a 
card, with the points of the compass 
marked on it, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture, the north end always being 
over the north- pole of the needle. 


The letters on the points of the com¬ 
pass are read as follows : N, north ; 
NbE, north by east; NNE, north- 
north-east ; NEbN, north-east by 
north, etc. The whole is enclosed 
in a round copper or brass box (with 
a glass over the top to keep the dust 
out), and this is put in a larger wood¬ 
en box and so arranged that the 
steel pivot on which the needle turns 
will always stand straight up, no 
matter how much the outer box may 
be tipped by the rolling of the ship. 
Thus the needle and the card on 
which the points of the compass are 
marked are always kept level, and 
the needle can turn round easily 
without any danger of being thrown 



off the pivot. The compass is 
always kept in a place called the bin¬ 
nacle, where the man who steers can 
easily see it. On the inside of the 
compass box, on the side towards 
the ship’s bow, is a black vertical 
(up-and-down) line. In steering, the 
helmsman keeps the point on the 
card toward which he wishes to go 
always on this line. For example, 
if he has been sailing directly north, 
and wishes the ship to go north-west, 
he turns the ship’s bow toward the 
left until the point marked N.W. on 
the compass card comes under the 
black line in the compass box. By 
keeping this point always on the line, 












COPAL 


149 


COPPER 


the ship’s bow will always point to 
the north-west. 

The compass used by land-survey¬ 
ors differs somewhat from the mari¬ 
ner’s compass, but is the same in 
principle. The miner who has to 
work deep in the earth finds the 
compass as useful as the sailor does 
at sea. 

The Chinese used the compass in 
some form at a very early period, 
but it was not known in Europe un¬ 
til the twelfth or thirteenth century. 

The word compass is from the 
new Latin co?nfiassus , a circle, and 
the compass is so called because its 
card has on it all the points round 
the circle of the horizon. 

COPAL, the resinous juice of trees 
which grow in Mexico, South Amer¬ 
ica, the East Indies, and Africa. It 
is obtained by cutting notches in the 
tree, into which the sap runs and 
hardens. It comes in small round 
pieces, colored from pale yellow to 
dark brown, and almost without, 
smell or taste. Its chief use is in 
making very fine VARNISH and lac¬ 
quer, much used in the arts. 

The word copal is from the Mex¬ 
ican copalli , resins. 

COPPER, one of the principal 
elements and metals. Copper 
was one of the first metals known to 
man, and was in use before iron. 
The ancient Egyptians cut their hard 
granite monuments with copper 
chisels, which they are supposed to 
have known how to harden, in some 
way now forgotten. Almost all the 
ancient nations used it largely in 
making BRONZE statues, household 
ornaments and articles of use, weap¬ 
ons of war, coins, etc. 

But little copper is found in the 
native state—that is, as pure metal 
—the most being from the mines on 
Lake Superior and from Peru and 
Bolivia. The copper of commerce 
is chiefly made from the ores of cop¬ 
per, of which there are several kinds : 
the carbonates of copper, in which 
the metal is mixed with carbonic 
ACID ; the oxides of copper, in which 


it is mixed with oxygen ; and the 
sulphurets of copper, in which it is 
mixed with sulphur and iron. One 
of the most beautiful of the carbon¬ 
ates of copper is malachite, which 
looks like stone, and is marked with 
stripes and circles of different shades 
of green, and takes a fine polish. It 
is cut into thin layers and used as a 
veneer for costly furniture, and it 
is also made into jewelry and orna¬ 
mental articles. Much of it is found 
in Siberia, and the Russians are very 
skilful in working it. 

There are several ways of getting 
copper out of its ores. The car¬ 
bonates and oxides are smelted in 
great furnaces with charcoal, by 
which the pure copper is at once 
melted out of them ; but the sulphu¬ 
rets, from which copper is mostly 
obtained, have to be smelted many 
times before all the sulphur and iron 
are got out of them. They are usu¬ 
ally made first into what is called 
“ regulus,” or “ matt,” which still 
has in it much sulphur, iron, etc. The 
matt is afterwards refined and made 
into pure copper by several more 
smeltings. Another plan for get¬ 
ting copper out of its ores is to dis¬ 
solve it with acids, and then to col¬ 
lect the metal from the acids. Great 
quantities of matt and of copper ore 
are sent yearly from different coun¬ 
tries to Great Britain, and particu¬ 
larly to Wales, where are the largest 
copper-smelting works in the world. 

Copper is much used in the arts, 
and is very valuable on account of 
its strength and the ease with which 
it can be hammered into plates and 
drawn into wire. It is alloyed (see 
Alloy) with gold and silver to hard¬ 
en those metals for the making of 
coins and jewellery; with tin for mak¬ 
ing BRONZE and bell metal ; with 
zinc for making BRASS ; and with 
nickel and zinc for making German 
silver. Great quantities of copper 
are drawn into wire and rolled into 
sheets. Sheet copper, or sheathing, 
as it is called, is put over the bot¬ 
toms of ships, because it oxidizes or 





CORAL 


150 


CORAL 


rusts very slowly in sea water, and 
because its rust is so poisonous that 
shell-fish will not stick to it. Cop¬ 
per is also used for the nails and 
bolts of ships, because its rust does 
not destroy wood as the rust of iron 
does. Maps and some other kinds 
of engravings are usually engraved 
on copper plates, because it is soft 
and easily cut, and has a fine grain. 
Many compounds of copper are also 
very useful. Among these are the 
oxides, one of which is used to stain 
glass green, and another to color it 
red. The sulphate of copper is 
“ blue vitriol,” used in dyeing, cali¬ 
co-printing, ink-making, and for 
preserving timber. The carbonate 
of copper, ‘ ‘ blue verditer, ’ ’ is largely 
used as a paint ; and another form 
of it is a green paint called Bremen 
green. Brunswick green is another 
compound of copper (see Verdi¬ 
gris). 

The largest copper - producing 
country in the world is Chili ; but 
there are very important copper 
mines in Australia, South Africa, 
and in various parts of Asia. Be¬ 
sides the Lake Superior mines in 
Michigan, the chief mines in the 
United States are in Vermont, Ten¬ 
nessee, Maryland, Virginia, and 
North Carolina. 

The word copper is from the Lat¬ 
in cuprum , or cyprium ces, Cyprian 
brass; and the metal was named 
from the island of Cyprus, the cop¬ 
per mines of which were much 
worked in ancient times. 

CORAL, the bony frame of the 
coral animal, which is rightly called 
a polyp. It is not made, as was 
formerly supposed, by the labor of 
this little animal, but is a growth 
caused by the food which it takes 
in, just as the skeleton is in land 
animals. Indeed, coral may prop¬ 
erly be called the skeleton of the 
coral animal. 

Coral animals look like small jelly- 
like substances, some of which are 
no wider than the head of a pin ; 
although others are much larger. 


They are fixed tight to the bottom 
of the sea, and never move away from 
the place where they were born. 
From their food, and from the sea 
water which they swallow, they are 
always taking in carbonate of lime 
(calcium carbonate), which passes 
through them and goes to build up 
the skeleton to which they are fast¬ 
ened, and which grows until they 
reach the top of the water, when 
they die, for coral animals can not 



Branching Coral. 


work out of water. In this way a 
column of carbonate of lime is built 
up from the bottom of the sea to the 
surface. As there are countless 
millions of these little animals doing 
this, great, masses of coral have been 
built up by them. In the Pacific 
Ocean there are coral reefs hun¬ 
dreds of miles long, and many islands 
are made almost entirely of coral. 

There are many different, kinds of 










CORAL 


CORAL 


151 


coral animals, all of which have dif¬ 
ferent ways of building. Some form 
trunks and branches like trees, some 
round masses, marked with stars or 
with twisting furrows like a man’s 
brain, and some great vases filled 
with things like flowers. Other cor¬ 
als grow in leaves rolled around each 
other like a cabbage, or imitate the 
forms of mushrooms, mosses, ferns, 
and flowers. 

In the first picture is shown a 
piece of one of the branching corals. 
When the animals to which this be¬ 
longed were alive, each one of the 
star-like ends was covered with a 
polyp, the lime from whose body 
caused the branch under it to grow 


higher and higher. In the second 
picture, which shows another kind 
of coral, several of the polyps can 
be seen on the top above the sur¬ 
face. On the left side of the picture 
the soft parts are shown cut away, 
so that the hard coral can be seen. 

Corals are found of many colors, 
from the deepest black through the 
different shades of red and yellow to 
pure white. Among the most beau¬ 
tiful is the red coral, which grows 
over the rocks on the bottom of the 
sea in little groves of purple trees, 
each stalk of which looks like a red, 
leafless shrub, bearing little star-like 
flowers. These tree corals generally 
grow from some shelf of rock, and 



Coral with Polyps Growing. 


hang downward, as shown in the 
picture. The flowers are the little 
coral animals, of which many grow 
on each stem. The stems have a 
kind of soft bark, and under this is 
the coral, which is hard as marble, 
and of a beautiful red. 

Some kinds of corals grow in all 
oceans, whether in hot or cold parts 
of the earth, but the largest reefs 
grow in the warm waters of the 
Pacific Ocean. The kind used for 
jewellery comes mostly from the Med¬ 
iterranean and the Red Seas ; the 
dark red is brought from the African 
coast of the Mediterranean and from 
the Red Sea, the pink from the coast 
of Italy, the yellow from the coast of 


Sardinia, and the black from the 
Red Sea. 

The principal places where the 
coral fishery is carried on are at the 
mouth of the Adriatic Sea, along the 
coast of Sicily, in the strait between 
Sardinia and Corsica, and off the 
coast of Algeria. Many people and 
boats are employed in the business. 
In some places the fishers dive down 
and gather the coral by hand, but 
generally a drag and net are used. 
The drag is made of two pieces of 
wood put together in the form of a 
cross, to the four ends of which is 
fastened a strong net. The middle 
of the net is looped up to the middle 
of the cross, where there is a heavy 






CORDUROY 


152 


CORK 


stone by which the drag is sunk and 
kept on the bottom. It is let down 
from a boat, which is slowly rowed 
along over the places where the coral 
grows, and the pieces broken off 
get tangled in the net and are drawn 
up into the boat. Coral jewellery is 
made chiefly in Naples and Marseil¬ 
les. 

Coral was much valued in ancient 
times. The Gauls adorned their 
helmets, shields, and weapons with 
it, and the Romans wore pieces of 
it as ornaments and as charms. 
When a Roman baby was born, a 



Red Coral. 


coral necklace was put round its 
neck, because it was thought to keep 
off diseases ; and sometimes it was 
even taken as a medicine. 

The coral animal belongs to the 
sub-kingdom of the radiates. 

The word coral is from the Latin 
corallium , which is from the Greek 
korallion, the name given by the 
Greeks to red coral. Korallion 
means daughter of the sea, being 
made up of the words kore , daugh¬ 
ter, and alos, the sea. 

CORDUROY, a thick kind of cot¬ 
ton stuff, made with ribs or cords. 


The best corduroy is woven with a 
twill (see Cloth). 

The word corduroy is from the 
French corde du roi , the king’s cord. 

CORK, the outer bark of a kind 
of oak which grows in countries 
around the Mediterranean. It is 
taken from the trees in July and 
August. Only the outer bark is 
cut off, the inner or living bark being 
carefully kept so that the tree shall 
not stop growing. The cork-cutter 
has a sharp-bladed axe, the handle 
of which is made at the end like a 
wedge. He first makes several cuts 
through the outer bark up and down 
the tree, and then divides these long 
slabs by making several cuts entirely 
round the tree. The bark is next 
pounded, which separates it from 
the under bark, and the pieces are 
then easily raised up and pried off 
with the wedge-shaped handle. The 
bark is first taken off from a tree 
when it is fifteen years old ; but the 
cork is not worth much. It takes 
about ten years for it to grow again, 
and it is then cut again. This crop 
is worth more than the first, but is 
still not very valuable. After this 
the cork is cut every eight or ten 
years, and grows better at every 
cutting. It is said that a tree thus 
barked will live a hundred and fifty 
years. The slabs are first soaked in 
water, and then dried. When nearly 
dried they are heated over a fire of 
coals which blackens them and 
closes up many of the little holes. 
They are afterwards flattened by 
pressing them under weights. 

Cork stoppers for bottles were 
formerly cut by hand with a very 
sharp knife, and many are still made 
in this way in foreign countries ; 
but most corks are now cut by a 
machine first made in the United 
States. Cork is also used in mak¬ 
ing cork jackets and other kinds of 
life-preservers, life-boats, soles for 
shoes, and other things. A paint 
called Spanish black is made by 
grinding the charcoal of burnt cork 
chips in oil. 










CORN 


153 


CORN 


The word cork comes from the 
Latin cortex , bark. 

CORN, the common name of the 
Indian corn or maize plant and its 
grain. In the United States the 
word corn is understood to mean In¬ 
dian corn, but in Scotland the name 
is usually given to oats, in England 
to wheat, and in Russia to barley 
and rye. Properly the name belongs 
to any kind of grass, the seeds or 
fruit of which are used for food, 
such as WHEAT, RYE, BARLEY, 
oats, maize, rice, and millet. 
These are almost the only grasses 
whose seeds are large enough for 
food, and they form a class by them¬ 
selves called the cereals (Latin cere- 
alia), from Ceres, a heathen god¬ 
dess, who was supposed to be the 
giver of all kinds of corn. The cere¬ 
als are all annuals—that is, they have 
to be newly planted every year, 
and wither and die after their seed 
have ripened ; and they all grow 
poorer year by year if not well culti¬ 
vated. 

Indian corn was not known to 
Europeans before the finding of the 
New World. It was grown by the 
Indians throughout both North and 
South America, and the early settlers 
soon learned its uses from them. 
Some corn grows not more than two 
feet high, while some in the South 
reaches eighteen feet, or three times 
the height of a man. The ears and 
grains are of many different sizes ; a 
kind growing in Brazil has ears no 
larger than a man’s little finger, with 
grains about as large as mustard 
seed, while Southern corn has very 
large ears, and grains half an inch 
long. The grains differ also in 
shape and color: some are flat, 
long, and pointed, some round and 
blunt, some smooth, some dented at 
one end, and some wrinkled all over ; 
and the color varies from white 
through yellow, red, brown, and 
purple, to black, and sometimes sev¬ 
eral colors are seen on one ear. But 
it is thought that all the kinds came 
from one original kind, and that the 


changes have been brought about by 
differences in climate and soil. 

Indian corn is one of the most im¬ 
portant articles of food in the world, 
and is more used than any other 
grain excepting rice. It is eaten in 
many different forms. When un¬ 
ripe it furnishes green corn, highly 
esteemed as a vegetable, and is made 
into “ succotash,” the Indian name 
for a dish made of green corn and 
beans boiled together. Large quan¬ 
tities of green corn are put up every 
year in tin cans for use in winter. 
Ripe corn broken or ground into 
coarse grains is called ” hominy,” 
or “samp,” which also are Indian 
words ; but sometimes the whole 
grain of corn, with only the outer 
skin rubbed off by pounding, is called 
samp. Corn is also ground into 
meal, from which are made many 
kinds of bread and cakes, and a 
kind of pudding called hasty pud¬ 
ding, mush, or stirabout. Some 
kinds of corn are called pop-corn, 
because they will pop open and turn 
inside out when heated over a fire. 
This is caused by the oil in the grain, 
which, turned into gas by the heat, 
bursts open the grain. The popped 
kernels, which are much larger than 
they were before, and are pure 
white, are largely sold, both sep¬ 
arately and when made into pop¬ 
corn balls by sticking them together 
with syrup made by boiling sugar. 
The grain, the stalks, and the leaves 
of corn are much used for feeding 
cattle, and the grain and the meal 
made from it are often fed to horses. 
The cured stalks and leaves are 
called fodder. 

The maize plant and its grain are 
manufactured into many valuable 
articles. Very good paper has been 
made from its leaves and husks, and 
the husks are used for filling mat¬ 
tresses, and for plaiting into mats 
and many other useful articles. Both 
syrup and sugar have been made 
from the juice of corn stalks, but 
they are not so good as those from 
sugar cane. Syrup made from the 






CORNUCOPIA 


154 


COTTON 


grain of corn is much used instead 
of sugar by confectioners and brew¬ 
ers. The starch of corn, under the 
names of “corn starch,” “ maize- 
na,” etc., is used for making pud¬ 
dings, cake, and blanc - mange. 
Corn contains a good deal of oil, 
which burns freely in lamps ; and in 
some of the Western States, where 
wood is scarce, corn on the cob is 
sometimes burned for fuel. Large 
quantities of corn are made into 
whiskey, which, from having been 
first largely manufactured in Bour¬ 
bon County, Kentucky, is generally 
called Bourbon whiskey. 

When the ripe corn has been 
gathered from the fields and piled 
up in the barn, it is the custom, in 
many parts of the country, for the 
boys and girls to form a party to 
husk it—that is, to pull off the leaves 
and silk with which the ears are cov¬ 
ered. These gatherings, which are 
called husking parties, are often very 
merry, each one working hard to see 
who can do the most. Some fine 
pictures have been painted of husk¬ 
ing parties. 

The word corn is Anglo-Saxon, 
and means any kind of grain. 

CORNUCOPIA, an emblem of 
plenty, a horn overflowing with flow¬ 
ers and fruits. It is used as an or¬ 
nament in architecture, and in sculp¬ 
ture is often put into the hands of 
statues of Plenty, Liberality, etc. 
The old Romans made it belong to 
Ceres, the Goddess of Harvest, 
whose statues always show the 
cornucopia in her hand or on her 
person, overflowing with the fruits of 
the field. 

The word cornucopia is Latin, 
and means horn of plenty, from 
Latin cornu, a horn, and copia, 
plenty. 

CORSET, an article of dress 
worn by women. Corsets are usually 
of strong cloth, made stiff with flat 
rods of whalebone or steel, and with 
an opening behind closed up by a 
lacing. They are intended both to 
sustain the figure, and to change the 


form when it is not good. Corsets 
properly worn are not injurious, but 
when laced tightly to make the waist 
small, they squeeze up the vital or¬ 
gans of the body, spoil its form, and 
seriously injure the health. 

The word corset is from the 
French corselet , a short form of 
corps , Latin corpus y body. 

COTTON. The cotton plant 
grows in the hot parts of both the 
Old and the New World. There 
are three general kinds—herb, shrub, 
and tree cotton. On herb and shrub 
cotton, the first of which is only a 
little plant, and the second about as 
large as a currant bush, grow what 
is called “ short-staple” cotton, or 
cotton whose down has short fibres 
or threads ; and on tree cotton, 
which is two and a half to three and 
a half times (15 to 20 feet) as high 
as a man, grows “ long-staple” cot¬ 
ton, whose down is very long, strong, 
and silky. Most of the cotton raised 
in the United States is short-staple ; 
only a little long-staple grows on the 
islands and a few other places along 
the coasts of the Atlantic and Gulf 
of Mexico, whence it is sometimes 
called sea-island cotton. The cot¬ 
ton tree grows also in India, China, 
and the north parts of Africa. In 
India the Hindoos make a very fine 
silky cloth out of its down, which 
they use for turbans. 

The cotton plant is raised from 
the seed, which in the United States 
is planted in March and April. It 
blooms in June. The blossom, 
which looks like that of the holly¬ 
hock, is straw color in the morning, 
white at noon, pale pink in the even¬ 
ing, and a purplish pink the next 
morning. After the flowers fall, the 
pods or bolls, which contain the 
seeds and the cotton, grow very 
fast, and soon burst open, forming 
balls that look like snow-white wool. 
These open first early in August, 
but. the plant continues to bloom and 
to ripen its bolls until frost comes. 
The fields look very beautiful at this 
time, with the white bolls mingled 




COTTON 


155 


COTTON 


with the bright green leaves of the 
growing plant. 

Cotton is picked by hand. The 
pickers walk between the rows, 
gather the down from the open bolls, 
and put it into bags which they carry 
tied around the neck or the waist. 
As each bag is filled it is emptied 
into baskets at the end of the rows. 
The cotton, as picked from the boll, 
contains the seeds, which are so 
mixed up with the down that it takes 
much labor to separate them. When 
cotton was first raised in this country 
the seeds were picked out by hand, 
but this is now done by the cotton 
gin, a machine invented by Eli 
Whitney, an American, in 1793. In 
this machine the cotton down is 
caught by circular saws set round on 
a roller and working between bars. 
These bars are so close together that 
the seeds can not get through, while 
the down is caught by the saw teeth 
and pulled through easily. The 
down is then brushed off the saw 
teeth by stiff brushes turning round 
under the roller, and after passing 
between rollers comes out pressed 
into a long thin sheet. 

Cotton seed have much oil in them, 
which is pressed out by machinery. 
This oil has been used for lamp oil, 
for making soap, for oiling machines, 
for mixing with paints instead of lin¬ 
seed oil, and for eating instead of 
olive oil, but it is used principally to 
mix with other oils. The part which 
is left after the oil has been pressed 
out is called “ cotton-seed cake/' 
and is used for feeding cattle. In 
the South much cotton seed is spread 
over the fields for manure. 

After the cotton has been ginned, 
the next work is putting it into bales 
and pressing it. This is done in 
presses worked usually by hand or 
horse power, but sometimes by a 
steam-engine. In the United States 
the bales are generally from 400 to 
450 lbs. in weight, or about three 
times as heavy as a man ; but in 
other countries they are made much 
lighter. In the East Indies, which, 


next to America, raises the most cot¬ 
ton in the world, the bales are made 
small enough to be carried on the 
backs of camels to the River Ganges, 
down which they are taken in boats 
to the ships at its mouth. The East 
Indian cotton is not so good as that 
raised in this country, because its 
threads are shorter and it cannot 
be spun so easily. Most of it is sent 
to China. A good deal of cotton 
is raised in Egypt, but the best Afri¬ 
can cotton is sent from Algeria. 
Good cotton is also raised in South 
America and in the West India 
islands. The yellowish color of the 
cotton commonly called Nankeen is 
not made by dyeing, but is the nat¬ 
ural color of a kind of cotton which 
grows near Nankin, China, from 
which place it gets its name. 

In old times cotton was always 
spun into thread by hand. This 
was the common daily work of un¬ 
married women in almost all fam¬ 
ilies, and from this such women 
came to be called ‘ ‘ spinsters. ’ ’ The 
spinner fastened a bunch of cotton, 
which had been carded or combed 
out straight, to the end of a forked 
stick called a distaff, which was 
held under the left arm or stuck into 
the belt. The cotton was then 
drawn out and twisted with the right 
forefinger and thumb, and the thread 
was wound upon a stick called a 
spindle, which was made to whirl 
round so as to twist it. This had a 
slit in one end, and whenever enough 
thread was spun for the spindle to 
reach the ground, it was wound up 
and the thread fastened in the slit. 
Afterward the hand spinning wheel 
was brought from India, where it 
had long been in use. This was a 
large wheel around which was a 
band or cord which also went round 
the spindle. When the wheel was 
turned round slowly with the hand, 
the spindle was made to turn very 
fast. The thread was hooked on to 
a little hook on the end of the spin¬ 
dle, and formed by the fingers as 
the spindle twisted. This was the 




COUGUAR 


156 


CRAB 


kind of wheel used by our grand¬ 
mothers for spinning cotton and flax, 
and some of them may still be seen 
in the garrets of old country houses. 

Cotton is now spun in factories by 
machines, which work so fast that 
one man can do as much work as 
several hundred men could do on 
spinning wheels, and the thread, or 
yarn, as it is usually called, is made 
much finer and evener. Indeed, 
thread so fine has been spun that a 
pound of cotton has been made into 
a yarn so long that, if stretched out, 
it would reach more than 100 miles. 
Before spinning, cotton from the 
bales has to be cleaned and carded, 
so that all the threads in it shall lie 
in the same way. It is next drawn, 
or made into a loose kind of thread, 
which is much too thick to be spun 
into yarn, and then twisted a little 
by a machine called the roving 
machine. The rovings are after¬ 
ward made into yarn by another 
machine called the mule-jenny. The 
yarns thus made are of many kinds, 
differing in weight and in fineness, 
and from them are made the various 
kinds of thread, such as sewing 
thread, lace thread, stocking thread, 
etc. All these are made by twisting 
together two or more yarns, some of 
them, especially sewing thread, be¬ 
ing passed through water or very 
thin starch, which makes the thread 
harder and stronger. Thread is 
tied up in hanks to be bleached or 
dyed, and is afterward wound upon 
bobbins, from which it is wound 
upon small spools or reels, or made 
into balls. (See Cloth.) 

The word cotton comes from the 
Arabic word koton. 

COUGUAR. The early settlers in 
the United States called this animal 
the catamount, or mountain cat. It 
was also sometimes called the painter 
(for panther), and some have called 
it the puma, American lion, and 
American tiger. The couguar is 
much like the panther, but is 
smaller. Its fur is reddish-brown 
above and white below, and the tip 


of the tail is usually black. In the 
forests of North America it lives 
mostly on deer, which it catches by 
lying in wait among the branches of 
trees near where the deer go to 
drink, and springing down upon 
them as they pass under. On the 
great plains of South America it feeds 
mostly on wild cattle, killing a great 
many to suck their blood. The 
couguar may be easily tamed, and 
has been known to show much affec¬ 
tion for its master. 

The couguar is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the cat family, which 
includes also the LION, TIGER, 
LEOPARD, PANTHER, JAGUAR, 
lynx, and common CAT. 

The word couguar is from cuguar- 
cuara, the South American Indian 
name of the animal. 

CRAB, a kind of shell-fish with 
ten legs, the front pair of which have 
strong claws shutting like pincers. 
There are many kinds of crabs, some 
of which live in salt water, some in 
fresh water, and some mostly on 
land. The common salt-water crab 
lives among the rocks, generally 
along the shore, but is also found 
in deep water. It is covered with a 
hard shell, made, like the shells of 
oysters and other such shell-fish, of 
lime got from sea-water, which, 
when once formed, never changes 
its size ; therefore, as the animal 
grows, it has to cast off its shell and 
get a new one. When very young 
it does this quite often, but after it 
has got its growth, only once a year. 
When the time comes for this, the 
crab crawls away into some lonely 
place or into some crack in the rocks 
where its enemies cannot catch it 
while naked. The upper shell be¬ 
comes loosened round the edges as 
the new shell grows under it, and 
finally comes off, but the shells of 
the claws do not open and the crab 
draws out its legs through the nar¬ 
row joints without harm. As the 
new shell hardens slowly, crabs are 
in much danger at this time of being 





CRAB 


157 


CRAB 


eaten by fishes. They are often 
caught while the new shell is grow¬ 
ing, and sold as soft-shell crabs, 
which are much esteemed for eating, 
being liked better than hard-shell 
crabs. 

The common crab will lay as 
many as 20,000 eggs, which are gen¬ 
erally red or yellow and very small. 
They are not left in the sand like the 
eggs of fishes, but are carried around 
by the female, hung on to little hairs 
under the tail, until hatched. When 
bom the crab is a swimming animal 
very different in shape from the 
grown-up crab, as will be seen in the 
picture, which shows one much en- 



First Form of a Crab. 


larged. In time it changes into 
another form, in which the upper 
part is much like the body of a full- 
grown crab, but with the tail still 
on it. At last the tail comes off, and 
the little animal becomes a crab, 
but so small that eight of them put 
in a line would not be more than an 
inch long. When full grown it is 
often larger than a man’s hand. 

The Hermit or Soldier Crab has no 
shell on the hinder part of its body, 
which sticks out some like a tail. 
As this part is apt to get hurt or 
broken off, the crab looks for the 
empty shell of some MOLLUSK, and, 


having found one to fit, backs into it 
and makes it its home, dragging the 
shell around with it wherever it goes. 
This habit of living alone in a shell 
has given this crab the name of her- 



Hermit Crab. 


mit crab. When it grows too large 
for the shell, it leaves it and looks for 
another one, and fierce battles often 
take place between different crabs 
for the possession of the best shells. 
From this they get the name of sol¬ 
dier crabs. 

Fiddler Crabs are very small, and 
live mostly in salt marshes along the 
seacoast. The males have one 
very large claw, the other being 
small. When they run they hold 
this large claw up 
in front of them 
in a threatening 
way. The females 
have only small 
claws. 

The Oyster Crab 

is a little crab 
which lives inside 
the shell of the 
oyster. Only females are usually 
found, the males, which are much 
the smaller, seldom going within the 
oyster. 

The Robber Crab of the Indian 



Oyster Crab. 






CRANBERRY 


158 


CRANE 


and Pacific oceans is a very large 
land crab, which feeds upon cocoa- 
nuts, climbing the trees and break¬ 
ing open the fruit with its claws. 

The crab belongs to the crusta¬ 
cean class of the articulata , or 
jointed ANIMALS. 

The word crab is from the Anglo- 
Saxon crabba , which is from the 
Greek karabos. 

CRANBERRY, the fruit of a plant 
which grows mostly in cool climates, 
in the northern parts of Asia, 
Europe, and America. It is a little 
smaller than a cherry, and is bright 
red or pink when ripe. The cran¬ 
berry thrives in damp marshy 
ground, over which its vines spread 
in a thick mat. There are large 
cranberry swamps in Massachusetts 
and New Jersey. The fruit is picked 
usually in September and October, 
and packed in kegs or bottles with 
water. It is very sour, and is much 
used for making pies, tarts, sauces, 
etc., and is often carried to sea as a 
preventive of scurvy. The Indians 
used to make poultices of it to take 
the poison out of arrow wounds. 
In Siberia wine is made from cran¬ 
berries. 

The word cranberry is said by 
some to be rightly craneberry. 

CRANE, a large bird with a long, 
sharp, straight bill, long neck, and 
long legs. Cranes live mostly in 
marshes and muddy flats. They 
usually go to warm countries in win¬ 
ter, and come north again in the 
spring, flying mostly by night in 
large flocks at a great height. One 
always leads, and the rest follow in 
two lines so as to form a triangle, 
making loud cries as they fly. When 
the leading one gets tired he goes 
behind and another one takes the 
head of the line. Cranes live chiefly 
on fish, small quadrupeds, insects, 
seeds, and roots. They build their 
nests in tall grass, of sticks and 
other coarse things, loosely put to¬ 
gether, and lay two bluish-white 
eggs. Both male and female sit on 
the nest. 


The principal crane in the United 
States, known as the American 
crane, is white, with black feet and 
dusky-yellow bill. It is sometimes 
called the whooping crane. Another 
kind is called the sand-hill crane. 
There are several kinds of cranes in 
Europe during the summer, but as 
soon as cool weather comes they fly 
over the sea into Africa, and some 
go even to Southern Asia. In an¬ 
cient times there were many queer 
stories told about these birds. The 
Egyptians said that they went every 
year to the sources of the Nile to 
fight the Pygmies, a race of dwarfs 
who lived in caves. These little men 
rode on rams and were armed with 
bows and arrows, but according to 
Pliny the cranes were victorious and 
drove them out of their city. 

Another story is about the poet 
Ibycus, who, while on his way to the 
Olympic games to strive for the 
poets’ prize, was murdered in a 
forest by two men. As he was dy¬ 
ing he looked up, and seeing a flock 
of cranes flying by, he cried out, 
“ O ye bird travellers, become the 
avengers of Ibycus !” The next 
day, while the two murderers were 
at the Olympic games, a flock of 
cranes flew over, making loud cries. 

‘ * Do you see the cranes of Ibycus ?’ ’ 
cried one to the other, in a jesting 
tone. Some persons standing near 
heard the remark, and as the news 
of the death of Ibycus had reached 
there, they caused the men to be 
arrested. They confessed their 
crime, and were put to death, and 
thus was Ibycus avenged by the 
cranes. 

The crane belongs to the order 
grallatores , or wading BIRDS. 

The word crane is from the Anglo- 
Saxon cran. 

CRANE, a machine for lifting 
heavy weights. The most common 
kind is made up of an upright post, 
A, which turns round, with an arm 
called a jib, B, reaching out from its 
top, as shown in the picture. On 
the end of the jib is a pulley, over 






CRANE 


159 


CRAPE 


which passes one end of the chain, 
C, the other end being wound round 
the drum or axle of the wheel. 
Around the outside of the wheel is 
wound a rope, D, which also goes 
round a roller, E, at the bottom of 
the crane, and is wound on it by 
turning the handle of the roller. 
When the hook on the chain is 
hitched to a heavy weight, such as a 
box or bale, the rope is wound up on 
the roller; this turns the wheel 
above, winding the chain up on its 
axle, and this lifts the weight. 
When it is as high as is needed, the 
crane post is turned and the weight 
is thus swung round and put where 
it is wanted. This kind of crane is 
very useful in unloading goods from 
ships and loading them again in 
wagons or carts. 

The travelling crane is made up 
of two frames moving on wheels, 
and joined together at the top by a 
strong frame. On each of the up¬ 
right frames is a barrel, on which the 
chain is wound up, and which is 
turned by a handle called a winch. 
When both the winches are turned, 



the chain is wound up on both the 
barrels, and the weight, which is 
hung on the hook in the middle, is 
raised up ; but if one winch be 
turned so as to wind up the chain, 
and the other one so as to unwind 
it, the weight will neither rise nor 


fall, but will move towards the side 
where the winch is winding up the 
chain, the little wheels on the top 
frame moving from side to side as 
the weight is pulled one way or the 
other. The travelling crane can 
easily be moved anywhere, and thus 



carry a heavy weight to another 
place. This kind of crane is much 
used in large buildings, in stone 
yards, and on docks. 

There are many other kinds of 
cranes, some of which are worked 
by steam and are made strong 
enough to move immense weights. 
One kind, strong enough to lift a 
ship out of the water, is called a der¬ 
rick, after Theodoric, the name of a 
noted hangman at Tyburn in the 
seventeenth century, because it is 
shaped something like the gallows 
used by him. 

The word crane is from the Anglo- 
Saxon cran , the crane bird ; and the 
machine is so named because its 
arm looks something like the neck of 
that bird. 

CRAPE, a kind of thin silk gauze, 
worn chiefly for mourning. It is 
woven out of raw silk, the threads 
being tightly twisted, and afterwards 
stiffened with gum, which as it dries 
partially untwists the threads and 
gives the fabric its rough or crinkled 
look. It is usually dyed black, but 
is sometimes used white as a trim¬ 
ming for dresses. China crape is a 
beautiful kind of smooth and heavy 


























CRAWFISH 


160 


CRICKET 


silk, made in different colors, and 
used for rich dresses, shawls, etc. 

The word crape is from the French 
crifie, which is from the Latin cris- 
/>us, crisped or curled. 

CRAWFISH, a small shell-fish 
which looks much like the lobster, 
found in running streams, ponds, and 
lakes. It changes its shell every 
year, gaining in size each time. The 
new shell becomes hard in a few 
days. When any of its claws or feet 
are lost by accident, they will grow 
out again. Crawfish conceal them¬ 
selves by day and come out of their 
holes at night to feed. They live 
mostly on animal food, both living 
and dead, and will even eat decayed 
things. They love to burrow in the 
mud, and they often dig under the 
levees of the rivers in the South so 
as to undermine them and cause 
freshets. Crawfish are much es¬ 
teemed for food, and are also largely 
used by fishermen for bait. 

The crawfish belongs to the CRUS¬ 
TACEAN class of the articulata , or 
jointed ANIMALS, and to the same 
family with the lobster. 

The word crawfish is from the old 
English creveys or crevish, which is 
from the French ecrevisse. It is 
sometimes spelled crayfish. 

CRAYON, a kind of pencil for 
drawing, sometimes called a pastel. 
Crayons are made of chalk, pipe 
clay, gypsum, or charcoal, and are 
of all colors. The materials are 
ground up into a paste with some 
gum, starch, wax, soap, sugar, etc., 
to make them hold together, and are 
then moulded into little rolls of the 
proper size. The paste is colored 
with different things, such as Naples 
yellow, indigo, vermilion, umber, 
and carmine, according to the color 
wanted. Black crayons are made of 
black chalk or of charcoal. 

The word crayon is French, and 
comes from the Latin creta , chalk 
or Cretan earth, which was got 
from the island of Crete. 

CREOSOTE, a yellowish, oily 
liquid, with a hot bitter taste, and a 


smoky smell. It is made up of 
CARBON, HYDROGEN, and OXYGEN, 
and is usually got by distilling (see 
Alcohol) wood tar. Meat is cured 
by smoking it because there is creo¬ 
sote in wood smoke ; and if a little 
creosote be put into the salt and 
water in which hams and tongues are 
soaked it will give them a fine flavor. 
Creosote is used as a medicine to 
stop vomiting, to dress sores, and 
to cure tooth-ache. When put into 
the hollow of an aching tooth, it 
stops the pain by deadening the 
nerve. Meat soaked in creosote and 
water will keep sweet a long time, 
and wood soaked in it is preserved 
from dry rot. 

The word creosote means flesh- 
saver, being from the Greek words 
kreas , flesh, and sozein , to save. 

CRESS, the name given to several 
kinds of plants used for salad. 
Among them are the water cress, or 
nasturtium, which grows beside 
running streams ; the garden cress, 
or peppergrass ; and the winter 
cress, which is found about hedges. 

The word cress is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ccerse. 

CRICKET, a small insect belong¬ 
ing to the same family with the 
grasshopper and the locust. The 
hinder legs of crickets are very long, 
and the thighs are strong and formed 
for leaping. The wings, of which 
there are four, are straight, and when 
not in use are folded lengthwise 
along the back. The shrill noise of 
crickets is made by the males only, 
by raising the fore wings and rub¬ 
bing them on the hind wings. There 
are several kinds of crickets in the 
United States : the principal of 
which are the black mole cricket, 
so called because it is like the mole in 
its habits, which lives in burrows in 
the ground ; and the tree cricket, a 
very delicate insect of an ivory yel¬ 
low color, which lives mostly on 
trees. In old times people feared to 
kill the cricket, as it was thought to 
bring good luck to the house where 
it lived. 




CROW 


161 


CROW 


The cricket belongs to the order 
orthoptera , or straight-winged in¬ 
sects. 

The word cricket is made from 
the Dutch krteken , to chirp. 

CROW. The common crow of 
the United States is some larger than 
a pigeon. It has a short thick neck, 
a large head, and a large straight 
bill, and is generally shiny black, 
though white ones, or albinos, are 
sometimes seen. Crows live in soci¬ 
eties near inhabited places, especially 
near farms. Farmers usually call 
them thievish birds, because they 
pull up the seeds of sprouting corn 
and other grain, and they kill a great 
many of them every year with guns, 
traps, and poisoned grain. They 
also put up scarecrows, or figures 
dressed up like a man or woman, in 
the fields to frighten them away, 
and almost every boy who can climb 
a tree robs their nests. But this is 
wrong, for although the crows may 
sometimes do a little damage, they 
do a great deal of good by eating 
insects, grubs, and worms which if 
left alone would harm the corn much 
more than they do. They also de¬ 
stroy many moles and mice, and 
even eat decayed things when they 
cannot get better food. In Japan 
they are made welcome everywhere 
on this account, and are never 
harmed. In the island of Corsica 
the farmers have a singular way of 
killing them. They roll up pieces of 
stiff paper into cones like a cornuco¬ 
pia, glue a piece of meat in the bot¬ 
tom, and smear the upper part with 
glue, and put them open-end up in 
holes in the fields. The crow plunges 
its head in, and draws forth not only 
the meat, but also the cone of paper 
glued fast to the feathers of the neck. 
Thus blinded, it rises in the air, but 
is soon tired out and falls to the 
ground. 

Crows are very sly, cunning birds, 
and are sure to keep out of the way 
of a man with a gun. When they 
feed in a field they usually have a 
watchman perched on a high tree, 


who gives the alarm when any one 
comes near, and when his loud ‘ ‘ caw, 
caw,” is heard they fly away to a 
safe place until the danger is past. 
Crows also eat snakes and frogs, and 
steal and devour the eggs of other 
birds. They take great pleasure in 
worrying small animals, such as the 
opossum and raccoon, and will even 
chase hawks and eagles. 

Some crows go south in winter and 
some stay where they usually live. 
They build their nests of sticks, 
woven with grass, in hidden places 
in swamps or thick woods, and one 
pair will often keep the same nest 
year after year. In some places, 
where there are no trees and shrubs, 
crows are said to build their nests of 
the dried bones of fish that have been 
thrown up on the shore. The eggs, 
usually five or six, are bluish-green 
spotted and marked with brownish- 
green. While the female is sitting, 
the male bird waits on her with the 
greatest care. 

The crow may be easily tamed, if 
taken from the nest when young, 
and may be taught almost as many 
tricks as the parrot. It may even 
be taught to speak a few words. 
If treated well, a tamed crow will 
show much affection for its master, 
and will come when called by its 
name ; but it is very apt to be mis¬ 
chievous and thievish. It will steal 
and hide away any small thing which 
it can carry, such as keys, specta¬ 
cles, and pocket - knives. I have 
heard of a crow which once stole the 
key of the smoke-house on a farm, 
and when the cook wanted to get 
some ham in the morning for break¬ 
fast she had to pull the staple out 
before she could get the door open. 
In a few days a new key was 
bought, and then the thief brought 
back the old one all rtisty. This 
same crow used to take great delight 
in stealing the dogs’ and cats’ din¬ 
ner and flying up on to the bam 
with it; and when it had eaten all it 
could it would come down and bury 
the rest. If a strange dog came on 





CRUCIBLE 


162 


CRUSTACEANS 


the place it would fly on its back and 
peck and scratch it until it was glad 
enough to run away. It liked the 
old cat very well, but when she 
brought out some new kittens it 
walked round them flapping its wings 
and scolding, pulled their ears, and 
frightened them nearly to death by 
swinging them round by their tails. 
This crow could whistle, laugh, call 
the cows, and make a noise like the 
dinner horn. 

The crow belongs to the order 
insessores , or perching BIRDS, and to 
the same family with the raven, 
rook, jay, and magpie. 

The Anglo-Saxons called this bird 
craw from the sound of its voice, and 
from this comes our word crow. 

CRUCIBLE, a vessel or pot in 
which glass, metals, etc., are melted. 
Crucibles are generally made of clay 
mixed with coke-dust, black-lead, 
sand, or broken crucibles. They 
have to stand so great a heat that 
they can be used only three or four 
times. At Krupp’s great steel 
works at Essen, in Prussia, crucibles 
are used only once and then broken 
up to be made over again. So many 
are needed there that 100,000 of 
them are drying at a time. Crucibles 
made of porcelain, platinum, silver, 
and black lead are used by chemists. 
Some pictures of the kind of crucibles 
used in melting glass are given in the 
article Glass. 

The word crucible is from the new 
Latin crucibulum , which is from 
the Latin crux , genitive cruc/s,. 
cross ; and the name was given to 
these pots because they were marked 
in old times with the sign of the cross 
to keep the devil away from them. 

CRUSTACEANS. This class of 
animals may be called the insects of 
the sea, because they are like insects 
in many things. Most of them have 
compound eyes, or eyes made up of 
small ones, like those of numerous 
insects, and they also have antennas, 
or feelers, and many pairs of legs ; 
but they are generally strong instead 
of weak, and are fitted, like FISHES, 


to breathe in water. They are all 
covered with shells, not stony like 
those of mollusks, but softer and 
made up of rings fitted together, like 
the bodies of all articulate animals. 
Their shell is really an outside skel¬ 
eton, and is formed, like the inside 
skeletons of other animals, by a 
limey matter given off from the 
BLOOD of the animal itself. It is 
made up of layers or leaves of lime 
(CALCIUM carbonate), the outside 
one of which is generally colored, 
sometimes dark brown, sometimes 
yellowish or reddish brown, and 
sometimes blue-black or green- 
black. When put into ALCOHOL, 
ACIDS, or boiling water, the color 
of the shells of most crustaceans 
changes to red, as is seen in boiled 
lobsters and crabs. 

Crustaceans usually change their 
shell every year. When the time 
comes for casting it, the body pines 
away and grows smaller until it sep¬ 
arates in all parts from it ; the shell 
then opens in some part, and the 
animal works itself out. This 
changing of the shell is necessary, 
because after it is once formed it 
does not grow with the other parts, 
and in time becomes too small for 
the body. When the old shell is got 
rid of, the animal crawls away into 
some quiet place and waits for a 
new one to grow. 

Most crustaceans have hooked 
claws with teeth, which they use as 
pincers, and with which they fight 
not only against their enemies, but 
with each other. In these fights 
they often lose a foot, a feeler, or a 
claw, but the lost parts grow again 
in a short time. This is the reason 
why lobsters and crabs are so often 
seen with one claw larger than the 
other ; the smaller one has been 
lost, and has not yet fully grown 
again. On the coast of Spain a 
kind of crab is caught for its claw 
alone, which is much prized for food. 
When the claw has been pulled off, 
the animal is thrown back into the 
sea to let another one grow. 




CUCKOO 


163 


CURRANT 


Crustaceans live mostly on the sea 
coast, among rocks and near the 
shore ; but a few live in deep water. 
They feed chiefly on other animals, 
both living and dead. They use 
their claws in eating, carrying food 
to the mouth first with one claw 
and then with the other, in much the 
same way as human beings use their 
'hands. When a crab catches a 
mussel with its shell open, it quickly 
seizes it with one claw so that it can¬ 
not close it, and then tears the meat 
out little by little with the other 
claw, until the whole is eaten. Large 
crabs often eat little crabs, tearing 
them to pieces bit by bit; but lob¬ 
sters generally kill their prey before 
beginning to eat it. Crustaceans 
have a great love for oysters, and 
some are said to watch for one to 
open its shell and then to slip a stone 
in so that it may eat it at its leisure, 
but this is doubtful. 

There are several orders of crus¬ 
taceans, but we shall notice but one, 
the decapoda , or ten-footed crusta¬ 
ceans, whose feet are mostly in five 
pairs. The LOBSTER, CRAB, 
SHRIMP, and CRAWFISH belong to 
this order. 

The word crustacean is from 
the Latin crust a, a shell, and these 
animals are so-called because they 
have shells. 

CUCKOO. The European cuckoo 
lives mostly in the warm parts of 
South Europe, but appears in Great 
Britain usually in April, and stays 
until August. Its back, neck, and 
breast are of a deep bluish gray, and 
the under parts are white barred 
with black. The cuckoo does not 
make any nest, but. has the singular 
habit of laying its eggs in the nests 
of other birds, and leaving them to 
be hatched by them. It is said also 
that the young cuckoos cast out of 
the nest the young of the bird which 
hatches them, and that the bird, not 
knowing of her loss, raises them as 
her own. The American cuckoos 
have not this bad habit. There are 
three kinds in the United States ; but 


the principal one is the yellow-billed, 
sometimes called the cow bird be¬ 
cause its notes sound like * 4 cow, 
cow.” It is greenish brown above 
and grayish below, and has a yellow 
bill about an inch long. It lives 
mostly in thick woods, and builds a 
nest of sticks and grass on the branch 
of some low tree. It lays four or 
five bright green eggs. Its food is 
chiefly insects, snails, and berries, 
but it also sucks the eggs of other 
birds. This bird is found in all 
parts of the United States—in the 
North during the summer, and in the 
South in cold weather. 

The cuckoo belongs to the order 
scansores , or climbing BIRDS, and to 
the same family with the parrot and 
the woodpecker. 

The word cuckoo comes from the 
Latin cuculus, Greek kokkux ; and 
the bird is so called from the sound 
of its note in spring. 

CUCUMBER. The cucumber first 
came from Asia. In its wild state 
it is very bitter, and it is thought 
that only long-continued cultivation 
has made it fit for food. In the 
United States it is eaten raw, cut up 
with salt, pepper, and vinegar, or 
made into pickles, but in Europe it 
is eaten cooked in different ways. 
The juice of the cucumber is used in 
medicine and in making pomades for 
the hair and cosmetics or liquids for 
beautifying the skin. Young cucum¬ 
bers pickled are sometimes called 
gherkins. The squirting cucumber 
grows wild in the south of Europe, 
When ripe the fruit drops off its 
stem and squirts out all its seeds 
and juice. A powerful drug called 
elaterium is made from its juice. 

The word cucumber is from the 
Latin cucumis. 

CURRANT. There are many 
kinds of currants, of which the red 
variety is the most common in the 
United States. The white currant 
is liked better by some because its 
juice is less sour. The black cur¬ 
rant has a larger berry than the 
other kinds, and is still less acid. In 





CURRY 


CUTTLE FISH 


164 


Russia there is a currant which bears 
bright yellow berries. 

The sourness of the currant is due 
to malic acid. Its juice is made into 
wine, jelly, preserves, tarts, etc. In 
Russia wine is made from the black 
currant, in Siberia its leaves are made 
into a drink something like tea, and 
in France a cordial called liqueur de 
Cassis is prepared from it. 

The currant gets its name from 
Corinth, in Greece, from whence the 
small grape called the Zante currant 
was first brought. The common 
currant, which is a different kind of 
plant, was named from this because 
its fruit looks much like it. 

CURRY, an East Indian powder 
or paste, much used in cooking as a 
seasoning. It is made of turmeric, 
coriander seed powder, pepper, 
ginger, cummin, mustard, mace, 
cinnamon, and cardamom, mixed in 
many ways. 

The word curry is from the Per¬ 
sian khdrdi, broth or juicy meat. 

CUTTLE FISH. The form of the 
cuttle fish can be best understood 
from the picture. It has ten arms 
or legs growing out round the head, 
two of which are longer than the 
others. It can walk head downward 
on these arms on the bottom of the 
sea, and it can swim by means of 
them and its fins ; but it can swim 
much faster backward by blowing 
water out of its breathing tube, 
which opens under the head. The 
hinder part of the body is fitted with 
a light soft bone the use of which is 
not exactly known, but some think 
it acts as a kind of fender to keep the 
animal from being hurt by striking 
against things when swimming back¬ 
ward. This bone, which is porous, 
or full of little holes, is the common 
cuttle bone, which we often see in 
bird cages. Birds love to whet their 
beaks on it, and they also get from 
it the lime which they need for the 
growth of their bones. A kind of 
tooth powder, called “white coral 
powder,’’ is made from cuttle bone, 
and jewellers make of it a powder 


called “ pounce’’ for polishing soft 
metals. 

The arms of cuttle fish have on 
them many little suckers, by which 
they seize and hold their prey. In 
stormy weather they sometimes an¬ 
chor themselves by means of the two 
long arms, thus leaving their other 
arms free. They will let these arms 
be broken sooner than let go of 
what they have seized. Like other 
cephalopods, cuttle fish have a bag 
filled with a black fluid like ink, 
which they can squirt out to darken 
the water when an enemy is near. 



Cuttle Fish. 


They will also blow out this ink on 
land. A story is told of an English 
officer who, after having dressed for 
a dinner party, walked down on the 
beach to study natural history, of 
which he was very fond. He found 
in the hollow of a rock a cuttle fish, 
which looked out with its great eyes 
at him with as much apparent interest 
as he looked at it ; but after a few 
moments of this fixed gaze the ani¬ 
mal ended the interview by blow¬ 
ing a stream of its ink all over the 
officer, who was obliged to go home 








CYMBALS 


165 


CYPRESS 


and change his dress. The Romans 
knew of this fluid and used it for 
making writing ink, and now the 
water color paint called sepia is made 
from it. Cuttle fish EGGS, which are 
usually fastened to seaweed, and 
look like a bunch of black grapes, 
are used in Italy for making neck¬ 
laces. 

Cuttle fish are found in the sea in 
all parts of the world, and in some 
seasons they come to the shore in 
great numbers. They live mostly 
on small fishes, of which they kill a 
great many, even after they have 
eaten all they want. But they have 
fierce enemies in the dolphins, which 
hunt them for sport, as they do little 
fish, and kill them wherever they can 
catch them. They are eaten by the 
people of many countries. 

The cuttle fish is acephalopod ani¬ 
mal of the sub-kingdom of mol- 
LUSKS. 

The cuttle fish gets its name from 
the old English word cuttle , a knife, 
because its bone is shaped some like 
the blade of a knife. 

CYMBALS, brass musical instru¬ 
ments, made of two round hollow 
plates, played by being struck to¬ 
gether, one being held in each hand 
by means of leather straps. They 


are used mostly by military bands, 
but sometimes also in orchestras. 
Cymbals are very ancient instru¬ 
ments, and were used by the Greeks 
and Romans, and by most Eastern 
nations. The best cymbals are made 
in China and in Turkey. 

The word cymbal is made from the 
Greek kumbalon , from kumbos, hol¬ 
low. 

CYPRESS, a large tree of the same 
family with the pine, which grows in 
the Middle and Southern United 
States. It is sometimes ten or 
twelve feet thick at the ground, and 
higher than two four-story houses. 
The trunk is often hollow and has 
its bark deeply creased, and all 
around it, especially in swamps, 
where it mostly grows, little pointed 
stumps called cypress knees spring 
up from the roots. The cypress has 
fine light green leaves, which turn 
brown and fall in the autumn, and 
its limbs are often hung with moss. 

Cypress wood is straight-grained 
and easily worked, and is much 
used in carpentry and for making 
shingles. It is also used for founda¬ 
tions of houses and for piles in wet 
places, as it will not rot under water. 

The word cypress is from the 
Latin cupressus , cypress. 




D 


DACE, the name of several kinds 
of small fishes found in fresh-water 
lakes and streams in the United 
States. The black-nosed dace, com¬ 
monly called MINNOW, is found in 
brooks in New England and New 
York. It is seldom more than three 
inches long, is brown above, silvery- 
white below, and has a dark band 
running from the head to the tail. It 
makes good bait for catching other 
fishes. The fish commonly called 
the roach, also found in New York 
and New England, is the roach- 
dace or silver dace, as there are no 
roaches in this country. It is dark 
brown above, the upper part of the 
sides bronze-green, and the lower 
part golden or coppery. The roach- 
dace is sometimes more than a foot 
long, but usually about eight or nine 
inches. 

The word dace is sometimes 
spelled dare, and is from the French 
dard, dart; the fish is probably so 
called from its shape, or because it 
darts in the water. 

DAGUERREOTYPE. See PHOTO¬ 
GRAPH. 

DAHLIA, a beautiful flowering 
plant, first brought from Mexico, 
but now common in Europe and the 
United States. The first roots were 
carried to Europe in 1790 by Hum¬ 
boldt. There are now said to be more 
than two thousand kinds of dahlias. 
The roots are eaten in Mexico, but 
are not thought fit to eat here. 

The dahlia is named from Dr. 
Dahl, a Swedish botanist. 

DAISY, a wild flower common in 
the fields in England and the United 


States. It has a yellow centre, from 
which branch out many white petals 
or leaves like rays. It is rightly 
called ox-eye daisy or whiteweed, 
the true daisy being another kind of 
plant. The daisy is a favorite flower 
with children. Girls pull off the 
white petals one by one, saying 
with one “ he loves me,” and with 
the next “ he loves me not,” and 
think that their fate in love will be 
like the words spoken with the last 
one. The flowers also make pretty 
chains and ornaments for hats. 

The word daisy is changed from 
day’s eye, which is from the Anglo 
Saxon dceges-eage, day’s eye. 

DAM, a bank or wall to hinder 
the flow of water in a stream. 
Dams have many uses, such as the 
storing up of water to turn ma¬ 
chinery or supplying aqueducts, the 
raising of the level of water in rivers 
to help navigation, etc. They are 
usually built where the stream is 
wide, especially where there are apt 
to be freshets, so that the water 
when high may flow freely over 
them ; if built in narrow places they 
have to be made very strong, as 
there will be great pressure upon 
them, for the water presses against 
the dam just as heavily as it does 
against the bottom. In still and 
shallow water dams may be built of 
earth, but where the current is swift 
and the water deep they are usually 
made of solid stone masonry or of 
timber, or of both together. A dam 
built to supply water to turn the 
machinery of a factory is usually 
made with a channel called a race, 
166 



DAMASK 


167 


DATE 


which leads the water directly to 
the WHEEL which it turns ; and 
when several factories or mills get 
their water power from one dam, a 
canal is usually dug on one side of 
it, and each factory gets its water 
through a race leading from the 
canal. 

A Coffer-Dam is a dam to keep 
water out of an enclosed place, 
usually in the bed of a river, so that 
digging or other work may be car¬ 
ried on within it. It is used in mak¬ 
ing the piers for bridges and in clear¬ 
ing away things which hinder navi¬ 
gation. It is made sometimes by 
driving down several rows of PILES 
and filling in the spaces between 
them with clay and gravel, some¬ 
times by sinking to the bottom a crib 
or kind of box made of strong tim¬ 
bers lined with plank, and some¬ 
times, when the space wanted is 
small, by sinking an iron cylinder. 
When the dam is finished, the water 
is pumped out of it, and workmen 
can then go down into it to do 
what is needed. 

The word dam is from the Anglo- 
Saxon demman , to stop the flow of 
anything. 

DAMASK, a kind of silk cloth 
with figures of fruits, flowers, etc., 
woven in it. In old times hand¬ 
some and costly dresses were made 
of it, but now it is used mostly for 
curtains and furniture covering. 
Damask is now made sometimes of 
woollen, and sometimes of linen, or 
a mixture of linen and cotton. It is 
woven with a twill (see Cloth) in 
which the weft threads skip eight of 
the warp. Linen damasks are used 
chiefly for table cloths and napkins. 
The cloth called diaper is a kind of 
damask in which the weft skips five 
threads instead of eight. 

Damask got its name from Da¬ 
mascus, where it was first made. 

DANDELION, a plant with a 
bright yellow flower, common in the 
fields in Europe and the United 
States. Its leaves are eaten for 
salad, and its roots are sometimes 


roasted and used for coffee. The 
juice of the plant is given as a medi¬ 
cine. When it goes to seed it 
makes a pretty white fluffy ball, 
which children call “ time flower” or 

the clock. ’ ’ When blown with the 
mouth, the white threads fly off, and 
they tell the time by the number of 
blows it takes to clear all the threads 
off. 

The word dandelion is from the 
French dent de lion , lion’s tooth, 
and the plant is so called on account 
of its deeply notched leaves. 

DATE, the fruit of the date palm. 
The tree grows in North Africa, 
Arabia, and Persia. It is quite tall 
and straight and has no branches, 
but bears at the top a crown of forty 
to eighty leaves, generally eight to 
ten feet long, amongst which the 
fruit hangs in bunches. It is one of 
the most useful trees in the world. 
The trunk makes timber for houses 
and fences, and wood for fuel ; the 
leaves are used for making baskets, 
bags, mats, fans, brushes, ropes 
and cords, and for covering roofs 
and walls ; and the fruit gives food 
to millions of people. Wine and 
vinegar are made from the fruit, and 
a liquor called palm wine from the 
sap of the tree. The soft pith of 
the shoots and the young unfolded 
leaves are eaten under the name of 
palm cabbage. Oil is made by 
grinding and pressing the stones of 
the fruit, and what is left is fed to 
cattle. In Africa the fruit is one of 
the chief articles of food, and is 
eaten either fresh or dried. Dried 
dates pounded together into a mass, 
as they are usually brought to this 
country, make the chief food of the 
caravans in their journeys through 
the great desert of Sahara. 

The trunk of the date tree is very 
hard to climb, but the Arabs have 
an easy way of getting up it to pick 
the fruit. The climber puts a rope 
round his back and under his arm- 
pits and then round the tree, and ties 
the ends in a knot. Putting the rope 
into one of the notches left by the 




DEER 


168 


DEER 


fallen stalk of a leaf, he slips the 
rope down to about the middle of 
his back, and then taking hold of 
the trunk with his hands and knees 
raises himself up a few inches. 
Then, while holding fast with 
knees, feet, and one hand, he slips 
the rope up with the other hand un¬ 
til it rests on the next notch, and so 
on until he gets to the top. The 
clusters of fruit are then picked and 
thrown down, where they are caught 
in a cloth held at the corners by 
other men. 

The word date comes from the 
Latin dactylus, a finger, and the 
fruit is so called because it is shaped 
some like a finger. 

DEER. There are many kinds of 


deer, and they are found in all parts 
of the world excepting Australia. 
They are generally graceful animals, 
and are noted for their shyness and 
fleetness. The males of almost all 
the kinds have branching horns 
which are cast off yearly, new ones 
growing in their place. The fe¬ 
male deer generally have no horns. 
The shape of the horns, which are 
called antlers, differs much in differ¬ 
ent kinds of deer, some being round 
with many branches, and some flat 
and broad. Deer’s antlers are not 
hollow horn, like the horns of cat¬ 
tle, but a bony substance which is 
really a part of the skull. 

In the male or stag of the red deer, 
or common deer of England, the 



Antlers of the Stag, from the Second to the Seventh Year. 


horns first come like two small knobs 
which grow out of the skull and push 
the skin up. The skin on them dies 
and in time the horns come off. 
New ones begin to grow at once, 
and in the second year are something 
like cows’ horns, without any branch¬ 
es. When they are of full size the 
skin comes off, leaving the horns 
bare and hard. These fall in turn, 
and are followed the third year by 
horns with one branch on each. 
Thus a change is made every year, 
the antlers increasing in size and in 
the number of branches each time 
until the animal has reached old 
age, when they begin to grow 
smaller. In the picture the growth 
of a stag’s horns is shown for six 


years, the first one being the second 
year’s growth, and so on. 

The skin which covers deer’s horns 
while they are growing is called the 
velvet, and the horns while so cov¬ 
ered are said to be “ in the velvet.” 
This skin is full of veins, and from 
the blood in them the antlers are 
made. The little creases for the ar¬ 
teries may be seen on the outside of 
almost any dry antlers. After the 
antlers are fully grown the supply 
of blood is cut off from the arteries 
little by little, and the skin or velvet 
then dries up and peels off. The 
deer almost always helps it off by 
rubbing his antlers against the trees. 

There are several kinds of deer in 
North America, including the Vir- 





DEER 


169 


DEER 


ginia deer, found east of the Mis¬ 
souri River, the wapiti, or American 
elk, of the northern and north¬ 
western parts of the United States ; 
the mule deer and the white-tailed 
deer of the north-west; the black¬ 
tailed deer of the Pacific coast; the 
moose of the north parts of Amer¬ 
ica, and the reindeer. 

The Virginia Deer is the one 
usually seen in parks. It is the 
most beautiful of all the deer, having 
a graceful form, with long slim 
legs, a long neck and small head, 
large ears, and large full eyes. The 
color is reddish-brown in summer 
and grayish in winter, with the 
throat and tail always white. It 
lives on grass in summer, but in the 
autumn eats many berries, nuts, 
and acorns, and in the winter feeds 
mostly on buds and tender twigs. 
The antlers or horns of the males 
are full grown in the middle of sum¬ 
mer, and remain till January, when 
they drop off and new ones begin 
to grow. The males are great fight¬ 
ers, and sometimes two of them get 
their horns so locked together that 
they cannot get them apart again, 
and die of starvation. The flesh of 
the common deer is tender and 
juicy, and of good flavor. 



The American Elk is much like the 
red deer of Europe, but is larger, 
being nearly as large as a horse. 
It is chestnut-red in summer and 


grayish in winter. Its horns are the 
finest of all the deer’s horns, being 
five or six feet long and having 
many branches, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture. A set of these horns have been 
found which were so long that when 
standing on their tips a tall man 
could walk through them without 
touching. The elk of Europe has 
large spreading flat horns. 

The word elk is from the Celtic 
elch or elg. Julius Caesar, who first 
wrote about the elk, called it alces. 



The Moose is the largest of all the 
deer family, being equal in size to a 
heavy horse. It has very long legs 
and a large ugly head with long 
broad antlers. It is grayish-brown, 
and its hair is coarse. The moose 
is an awkward animal, but can run 
very fast. It is still common in the 
wild parts of Maine and northern 
New York, and thence upward to 
the frozen regions. In the winter 
the moose keeps on the wooded hill¬ 
sides, living on tender shoots and 
the bark of trees, being very fond of 
birch and poplar. In the spring it 
comes down to the rivers and lakes, 
and may often be seen standing in 
the water to get rid of the flies and 
gnats. Its antlers are shed every 
year, usually in December ; they 
begin to grow again about the first 
of April, and are full grown in June 
or July. The flesh of the moose is 
coarse, but is much liked by many. 







DEMIJOHN 


170 


DEW 


The word moose is from the In¬ 
dian name of the animal, which was 
mongsoa or moosoa. 

The Caribou, or American Rein¬ 
deer, is found in Maine, New Bruns¬ 
wick, and westward as far as Lake 
Superior. It is thought by some to 
be the same as the reindeer of Lap- 
land. It is considerably larger than 
the common deer, is deep brown in 
summer and grayish in winter, and, 
unlike other deer, both males and 
females have horns. In winter it 
lives mostly in swamps, feeding on 
mosses and lichens, but in spring it 
goes up the hillsides and lives on 
buds and twigs. Far in the north 
herds of more than a hundred of 
them are sometimes seen. The car¬ 
ibou is very fleet, and not easily 
tired. Hunters have sometimes fol¬ 
lowed one more than a week with¬ 
out being able to get a shot at it. 
The flesh is tender and of good fla¬ 
vor. The skin when dressed makes 
the best clothing for very cold coun¬ 
tries. It is said that a person wear¬ 
ing a suit of caribou leather and hav¬ 
ing a blanket of the same can sleep 
warmly on the snow even in the great 
cold of an Arctic winter’s night. It 
is thought that the caribou may be 
tamed and made as useful as the 
REINDEER of Lapland. 

The deer is one of the most useful 
of the wild animals. Its flesh, which 
is called venison, is excellent for 
food; its tanned skin, commonly 
called buckskin, is valuable for many 
uses ; its sinews furnish the Indians 
with bow-strings and cords for many 
other purposes ; and its horns are 
made into handles for knives, etc. 

The deer is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia , or cud-chewing 
animals. 

The word deer comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon word deor, which once 
meant any small animal. 

DEMIJOHN, a kind of large glass 
bottle covered with wicker-work. 
The glass part is blown, like any 
other bottle, and the wicker-work, 
which is usually of willow or osier, 


is then woven around it in the same 
way that a basket is made. Demi¬ 
johns are very useful because, on 
account of their strength, they can 
be made much larger than bottles. 
Acids are commonly put up in large 
demijohns called carboys. 

The word demijohn is from the 
French dame-jeane f Lady Jane. In 
Egypt a demijohn is called dama- 
gan , which is said to be from Dama- 
ghan, a town in Persia, once noted 
for its glassworks. 

DERRICK. See CRANE. 

DEW. A certain amount of heat 
is necessary to keep the watery 
vapor in the AIR from condensing, 
that is, from changing back again 
into water ; and the lowest degree 
of heat at which it will remain in 
the air as vapor is called the dew¬ 
point. While the heat is above or 
at the dew-point the vapor will stay 
in the air ; but if the heat falls be¬ 
low the dew-point the vapor will be 
condensed and will fall to the earth 
as dew or RAIN. 

The earth, which gets its heat 
directly from the sun itself, and not 
from the air, which the sun does not 
heat, is always radiating, that is, 
giving off, its heat; and not only 
the earth, but all things on it, es¬ 
pecially all kinds of plants, are all 
the time radiating heat, so that at 
night, when there is no sun to give 
them more heat, their surfaces be¬ 
come cold. When air which is full 
of vapor touches these cold surfaces 
the part of it next to them is cooled 
below the dew-point and its vapor 
is condensed on them in the form of 
dew. The moisture which collects 
on the outside of a pitcher of ice 
water in a warm room is an example 
of this. There is more dew on a 
fine clear night than on a cloudy 
night, because when there are no 
clouds the heat given off by the 
earth passes into space, or the upper 
air, and is lost, and the earth be¬ 
comes cold enough to condense the 
vapor into dew ; but when there are 
clouds they stop the heat from 




DIAMOND 


DIAMOND 


171 


going off into the upper air, and the 
earth does not become cold enough 
to condense the vapor. An awning 
or a tree will keep the dew from 
forming under them, not because 
it stops the dew from falling, but 
because it prevents the heat from 
rising from the earth, so that it does 
not become cold enough to condense 
the vapor in the air which touches 
it. Grass and the leaves of plants 
radiate heat very freely, and so re¬ 
ceive more dew, which is necessary 
for them, than polished metals, 
smooth stones, and woollen cloth, 
which do not need dew. If polished 
metal collected dew as easily as 
grass, it would be very hard to keep 
it from rusting; and if woollen 
cloth collected it readily, our clothes 
would be often wet at night. See 
Frost. 

The word dew comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon deaw. 

DIAMOND. The diamond is the 
purest form of CARBON, and is val¬ 
uable on account of its rarity and 
brightness. It is the hardest of all 
known things, is not hurt by ACIDS 
or alkalies, and may be heated 
red hot without injury ; but it may 
be burned in oxygen gas, or even 
in the open air if the heat be very 
great. 

Diamonds are found in earth 
mixed with gravel. When first dug 
up they are usually covered with a 
yellow or reddish crust. When this 
is taken off their brightness is seen, 
but they are generally of a bad shape 
and have to be cut before they are 
fit to set in jewelry. Most diamonds 
are without color and as clear as 
water ; but sometimes, on account 
of other things mixed with them, 
they are white, gray, yellow, brown, 
or green, and more rarely red, blue, 
and black. Diamonds perfectly free 
of color are said to be of the first 
water and are most valued. Those 
of a slight rose tint are valued 
highly, and next to these green tinted 
stones are considered the best. Black 
diamonds are also very rare, but 


those which are slightly brown or 
tinged with the other colors are least 
valuable. The largest and finest 
diamonds are brought from India, 
chiefly from the Golconda mines, 
but many fine ones are found in 
Borneo and in Brazil, and of late 
years a great many have been 
brought from South Africa. Dia¬ 
monds have been found in the United 
States in North Carolina, Georgia, 
Virginia, and California, but no very 
large ones. 

Diamond Cutting is very slow and 
tiresome work, and sometimes many 
months are needed to make a very 
large stone fit for setting in jewelry. 
The parts of the stone not needed 
in shaping it are first split off, for 
though the diamond is very hard it 
may easily be split. The stone is 
fixed in a little ball of CEMENT, and 
the piece to be taken off is marked 
by scratching round it with another 
diamond ; it is then easily split off 
by putting the blunt edge of a knife 
in the cut and striking the back of 
the knife with a little hammer. The 
pieces thus chipped off are called 
“bort.” They are used for grind¬ 
ing down other diamonds and gems, 
by glaziers for cutting glass, by 
watchmakers for drilling holes in 
rubies and other hard stones for the 
works of watches, and by gem en¬ 
gravers for cutting stones; and some, 
when large enough, are cut into 
small stones for jewelry. After 
the waste parts of the stone have 
been split off, it is then ready to be 
cut. To cut a diamond means to 
grind its surface so that it shall be 
covered with the little flat faces, or 
facets as they are called, which are 
seen in all diamonds set in jewelry. 
The stone is fastened in a ball of ce¬ 
ment on the end of a stick and rub¬ 
bed with another diamond set in the 
same way on the end of another 
stick. The workman rests the stick 
on the edge of a little box, and the 
dust, called diamond powder, which 
is rubbed off, falls through the fine 
holes in the bottom of the box and is 





DIAMOND 


172 


DIAMOND 


saved to polish with. In this way 
each facet is worn down little by lit¬ 
tle. When all have been thus cut 
and the stone is in the shape wanted, 
it is given to the polisher, who fast¬ 
ens it with soft solder into a copper 
cup at the end of a stout wire, and 
holds it against a small steel wheel, 



Fig. 1.—Table-cut Diamond—Top View. 

wet with oil mixed with diamond 
powder, which is made to turn round 
very fast. By this means the facets 
are polished one by one, the stone 
being set in new solder for grinding 
each facet. Polishing takes much 
more time than cutting. 



Fig. 2.—Rose-cut Diamond—Side View. 

Diamonds may be cut into various 
forms, called the table-cut (Fig. 1), 
the rose-cut (Fig. 2), and the bril¬ 
liant (Fig. 3). Most stones now 
used in jewelry are made into bril¬ 
liants, because brilliant-cut stones 
have many more facets than the other 



Fig. 3.—Brilliant-cut Diamond—Side 
View. 

kinds, and the light is therefore 
reflected and refracted more times. 
This makes more rainbow tints in it, 
and therefore gives it greater beauty. 
Diamonds waste much in cutting, 
some stones losing more than one 
half their weight. 


The Orloff Diamond, named from 
Count Orloff, who bought it in 1772 
for the Empress Catherine of Rus¬ 
sia, is the largest cut diamond in the 
world which is known to be a true 
diamond. It was once the eye of 
an idol in India. A Frenchman, 
who happened to see it, made a 
glass one like it and, watching his 
chances, put it in the place of the 
diamond, with which he ran away. 
He sold it to the captain of a ship 
for $10,000, and the captain took it 
to Europe and sold it for $100,000. 
At last it came into the hands of a 
diamond merchant, who sold it to 
Count Orloff for $450,000 in money 
and a yearly payment during his life 
of $20,000. The empress also made 
the merchant a noble. This stone, 
which is rose-cut, is shaped like half 



Fig. 4.—Orloff Diamond—Side View. 

a pigeon’s egg, and weighs 194! 
carats (see Precious Stones). Its 
size and shape are shown in the pic¬ 
ture. 

The Pitt or Regent Diamond, 

which is the next largest one, gets its 
first name from Mr. Pitt, Governor 
of Madras, India, who bought it, 
in 1702, for $100,000. Its other 
name comes from the Regent Duke 
of Orleans, to whom Mr. Pitt sold it, 
in 1717, for Louis XV., for $650,- 
000, but it is said to be worth twice 
that sum. It is thought to be the 
most perfect brilliant-cut diamond in 
the world. It weighed at first 410 
carats, but Mr. Pitt had it cut, and 
its weight is now 136! carats. 

The Florentine or Grand Duke 
Diamond, a fine yellow stone, rose- 
cut, belonging to the Emperor of 
























DIAMOND 


173 


DIAMOND 


Austria, is the third one in size. 
This is one of three great diamonds 
lost by Charles the Bold at the battle 
of Granson (1476). A Swiss soldier 



Fig. 5.—Star of the South as found. 


found it, and thinking it to be a 
piece of rock crystal, sold it for a 
few pennies. It weighs 133^ car¬ 
ats. 

The Star of the South, the fourth 



Fig. 6.—Star of the South as cut—Side 
View. 

great diamond in the world, was 
found by a negro in Brazil in 1853. 
It weighed 254^ carats when found, 
and only 124^ carats when cut. The 
pictures show its shape and size be- 



Fig. 7.—Star of the South as cut—Top 
View. 

fore and after cutting ; Fig. 5 being 
the rough stone, as it was found, 
and Figs. 6 and 7 being side and 
top views of the stone as it now is. 


The Koh-i-noor (Mountain of 
Light), now owned by the Queen of 
Great Britain, is the fifth one in 
size. When this stone was found, 
in Golconda, India, several hun¬ 
dred years ago, it weighed 793! car¬ 
ats. An Indian prince, who owned 
it, got an Italian to cut it for him, 
and he did it so badly that he low- 



Fig. 8.—Koh-i-noor, First Cutting—Side 
View. 


ered its weight to about 186 carats. 
In 1850 it came into the hands of 
Queen Victoria. It has since been 
cut to a rose form, and now weighs 
only io 6 t ^ carats. Figs. 8 and 9 
show side and top views of the 
Koh-i-noor as first cut, and Figs. 10 
and 11 side and top views after the 
last cutting. 



Fig. 9.—Koh-i-noor, First Cutting—Top 
View. 


There is a very large stone, called 
the Braganza, among the crown 
jewels of Portugal, which weighs 
1880 carats. The Portuguese say 
it is a diamond, but it is generally 
thought to be only a topaz. Another 
very large stone, said to be a real dia¬ 
mond, is owned by the Rajah of 
Mattam, in Borneo, where it was 































DIAMOND 


174 


DIE 


found in 1760. It is about as large 
as a small hen’s egg, is shaped like 
a pear, and weighs 367 carats. This 
is probably the largest uncut dia¬ 
mond known. A diamond weighing 
288| carats was found in South Af¬ 
rica in 1873, but it is not a very fine 
stone and is full of flaws. It is called 
the Stewart diamond. The King of 



Fig. 10.—Koh-i-noor, Second Cutting— 
Side View. 

Portugal is said to have a diamond 
of 138 carats, and the Sultan of Tur¬ 
key one of 148 carats, but not much 
is known about them. 

The word diamond is from the 
Old English diamant , which came 
from the Latin and Greek adainas , 
meaning unconquerable ; and the 
stone was so called because it cannot 
be cut by any other substance. 



Fig. 11.—Koh-i-noor, Second Cutting- 
Top View. 

DIE, the metal stamp with which 
the devices, or figures, are stamped 
on coins, medals, etc. Dies for 
coining or stamping are always made 
of the finest steel. The engraving 
of them is called die-sinking, and 
the engraver a die-sinker. There 
are always two dies for each coin or 
medal, one called the die for stamp¬ 
ing the obverse or upper side, and 


the other called the counter-die, for 
stamping the reverse or under side. 

In making a die a piece of steel is 
cut off from the end of a bar, made 
into the right shape, and strength¬ 
ened by putting an iron ring around it. 
After the face has been made 
smooth, the steel is softened by 
heating it in the fire and cooling it 
very slowly, and the die-sinker then 
engraves on it the figures wanted. 
This is very difficult, each letter and 
figure having to be cut out little by 
little by means of small and very 
hard steel tools. This takes weeks 
and sometimes months of patient 
and careful labor. The die thus 
made, which is called the matrix, is 
just the opposite of a coin, all the 
parts which are raised on the coin 
being sunk below the surface in the 
die. Figures cut below or into a 
surface are said to be in intaglio 
(Italian intagliare , to cut in) ; and 
when raised above the surface they 
are said to be in relief (Italian 
rilievo, raised work). 

The die is now hardened by heat¬ 
ing it red hot and cooling it suddenly 
in water, and is then ready to be 
used for coining. But the first die, 
or matrix, is generally used only for 
making other dies. By carefully 
driving into it a round piece of soft 
steel of the right size, an exact copy 
of the matrix is made on it, only 
that the figures are raised above the 
surface instead of sunk below it. 
This new piece, which is called a 
punch or puncheon, is now hard¬ 
ened, and by driving it in the same 
way into other pieces of softened 
steel exact copies of the matrix may 
be made ; and these last ones are 
used in coining money, after the date 
has been cut in the right place. 

Dies for coining money are not 
cut so deep as those for making 
medals, because coins in too high 
relief would wear out too soon and 
too much pressure would be needed 
in the coining-press to stamp each 
piece, making it therefore cost too 
much. Dies are used also for strik- 









DIME 


175 


DIVING-BELL 


ing out metal buttons, ornaments 
for harnesses, and a great number 
of other metal manufactures, but 
they are not so carefully made as 
those for coining. 

Another class of dies are used in 
stamping figures on paper, cloth, 
leather, and other soft things. Book 
covers are stamped with such dies, 
which are cut in brass instead of in 
steel. All kinds of raised figures and 
ornaments, whether plain, printed in 
colors, or gilded, are put on to 
book covers, portfolio covers, and 
other such things, by means of brass 
dies, some of which take much time 
and skill to make. 

The word die is in French dt. 

DIME, a silver coin of the United 
States, worth ten cents. It was 
first coined in 1796. 

The word dime is from the French 
dixieme , a tenth, from the Latin 
dec an, ten. 

DISTAFF, the staff for holding the 
flax or wool from which the thread 
is drawn in spinning by hand on the 
common spinning wheel. It is not 
much used now, as thread for weav¬ 
ing is mostly made by machinery. 
The distaff is a very ancient instru¬ 
ment and is often put into pictures 
as an emblem of woman ; hence in 
poetry it is sometimes used to mean 
woman or the female sex. 

The word distaff is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon distcef. 

DIVING-BELL, a hollow vessel, 
sometimes bell shaped, in which a 
person may go down under water 
and work. The way in which it 
works may be seen by pressing a 
tumbler down bottom upward into 
water. The air in it, having no way 
of getting out, keeps the water out; 
but as air is compressible, it is 
pressed up into a smaller space, and 
if the tumbler were pushed down 
thirty-three feet under water the air in 
it would fill just half the space it did 
at the surface. It is just the same 
in the diving-bell, and the person 
who goes down in one has to breathe 
this closely packed air. If he had 


no more air to breathe than that 
which is in the bell, he could stay 
under water only a few minutes, so 
fresh air is pumped into it through 
a tube, which leads into the top of 
the bell. If this pipe were open 
all the time, the air would rush up 
through it out of the bell, and the 
water would rise up and fill the bell 
and perhaps drown the man in it. 
This is prevented by having a little 
valve, or small door, which opens 
inward only. The air which is 
pumped down through the tube is 
thicker than that in the bell, and the 
valve is therefore pushed open and 
the air forced in. As soon as the 



AIR-PUMP stops working, the air in 
the bell shuts the valve and keeps it 
tight until more air is pumped down. 
But the pump is usually kept work¬ 
ing while any one is in the bell, so as 
to keep the air pure. If too much 
air is forced in, it comes out of the 
open bottom of the bell and flows 
up to the top of the water in great 
bubbles. 

The diving-bell is commonly made 
of cast iron, so that it will sink by 
its own weight and will be strong 
enough to resist the pressure of the 
water, which is very great. It has 
seats for the workmen, and is hung 
























DIVING-BELL 


176 


DOCK 


by chains to a CRANE, which is 
sometimes on shore and sometimes 
in a vessel. Men above work the 
air pumps and answer the signals of 
those in the bell. 

Diving Armor is sometimes used 
instead of a diving-bell. This is 
made up of a copper helmet large 
enough for the head of a man to 
move about in freely, and which has 
several thick glass windows in it, so 
that he can see in all directions ; a 
copper breast-plate, to which the 
helmet is fastened ; and an India- 



rubber dress, which covers all the 
lower part of the body. When the 
diver has this on, he can go under 
water without getting at all wet. 
Before going down he puts on shoes 
with heavy lead soles, which make 
him sink easily to the bottom and 
help him to stand up in the water. 
He is then let down by a rope tied 
round his waist, and air is pumped 
down to him through a tube. This 
diving armor is now much used in 
laying stone foundations under 
water and in raising sunken vessels. 


It is also used by coral, sponge, and 
pearl divers, in some places. 

DOCK, a basin for ships in a har¬ 
bor or river, where they may load or 
unload, or be repaired. In the 
United States a wharf is wrongly 
called a dock ; the dock is rightly 
the space or slip between two piers, 
and not the pier itself. There are 
several kinds of docks, but they may 
all be divided into wet docks, in 
which ships lie to load or unload 
their cargoes, and dry docks, where 
they are hauled out of the water for 
repairs. 

In this country the rise and fall of 
the tide is so small that our docks 
are usually only open slips ; but in 
England the difference is so great 
between high and low tide that ves¬ 
sels in slips like ours would some¬ 
times be far above the pier and 
sometimes a good way below it. 
This would be very unhandy in tak- 
ing goods in or out, and so docks 
are built with gates which keep the 
water always about the same height. 
At high tide, when the water out¬ 
side the dock is as high as that in¬ 
side, the gate is opened and ships 
pass out and in ; but as soon as the 
tide begins to fall the gate is closed, 
and the water in the dock, which 
would run out with the tide, is thus 
kept always high. Most of the Eng¬ 
lish docks are made with locks (see 
Canal), so that by wasting a little 
of the water in the dock vessels may 
be let in or out at any tide. The 
Atlantic Dock at Brooklyn is prop¬ 
erly a basin and not a dock, because 
it has no gates and the tide flows in 
and out of it. 

Dry Docks, sometimes called grav¬ 
ing docks, because they are used 
for graving or cleaning the bottoms 
of ships, are of two kinds. One 
kind is solidly built of water-tight 
masonry and fitted with a gate which 
is closed after the vessel has been 
floated into it, and the water is then 
pumped out, leaving the vessel dry. 
Another kind, sometimes called a 
floating dock, is built of timber and 











DOG 


177 


DOG 


planks, or of iron and planks, and is 
so made that by letting water into 
its air-tight boxes it may be sunk 
deep enough to float a vessel on to 
it ; the water is then pumped out of 
the boxes and they fill with air, 
which raises the dock up with the 
vessel on it. As the dock is open at 
both ends, all the water runs out of 
it as it comes up, and the vessel is 
thus left dry. Some docks, called 
screw docks, are fitted with a frame 
into which the vessel is floated, and 
the frame with the vessel on it is 
then raised up by means of screws. 

The word dock is in German 
docke , and is perhaps from the Ital¬ 
ian doccia , a mill dam. 

DOC. It is not known where our 
tame dogs first came from, although 
there are several breeds of wild 
dogs in different parts of the world. 
Some think that all wild dogs were 
once tame, and others think that all 
dogs, both wild and tame, are de¬ 
scendants of wolves. The prairie 
wolf and the coyote of the West are 
wild dogs, and it is supposed that 
the Indian dogs came from them. 
In the West Indies and South Amer¬ 
ica are many wild dogs, supposed to 
be the descendants of dogs carried 
there by the Spaniards. They hunt 
in bands, and do much harm to 
flocks and to the young of cattle and 
horses. 

The common or tame dog differs 
much in size, form, color, and char¬ 
acter. The German boar hound, 
used for hunting the wild boar, is 
nearly four feet high at the shoul¬ 
der, while some of the smaller kinds 
are only a few inches high. The 
hair of some dogs is long, fine, and 
shaggy, of others short and coarse, 
and there is a breed in India which 
has its skin entirely bare. Some 
have small sharp ears which stand 
up, and others have long, large, 
hanging ears. In some the feet are 
webbed, fitted for swimming; in 
others the feet and legs are made 
for running swiftly. 

The young of dogs, called pup¬ 


pies, are born with their eyes shut, 
and do not get them open until they 
are ten days old. Dogs are full 
grown when they are two years old, 
and they live generally about fifteen 
years. Young dogs are apt to have 
a disease called the distemper, which 
comes on usually when they are get¬ 
ting their teeth. It lasts generally 
twenty to forty days, and about half 
the dogs born die of it. They also 
have sometimes a dreadful disease 
called hydrophobia, a word made of 
two Greek words, udor, water, and 
phobos , fear, in which they show 
great fear of water, and will not 
touch it even when thirsty. A dog 
with this disease has red eyes and 
no appetite, and is dull and cross, 
and after a while is seized with mad- 



Head of Esquimaux Dog. 


ness, and runs here and there, biting 
at whatever comes in its way. It is 
very dangerous at this time, because 
whatever it bites is apt to have the 
same disease, and it should be at 
once killed. 

The Esquimaux Dog, so called be¬ 
cause it is much used by the Esqui¬ 
mau Indians of Greenland and the 
northern parts of America, is nearly 
the same as the Siberian dog. It 
has shaggy black and white hair, a 
bushy tail, a sharp nose, and small 
pointed ears which stand up as in 
the picture. It is bold, fierce, and 
strong, is a good swimmer, and 
loves to play and burrow in the 
snow. This dog is not only the 
friend and companion of its master, 
but is also his beast of burden, and 




DOG 


178 


DOG 


will drag him for hours at a time at 
great speed on his sled. In Green¬ 
land these dogs are harnessed sev¬ 
eral abreast, or in a row sidewise, 
but in Siberia they are harnessed in 
pairs, one pair ahead of the other. 
Ten or twelve dogs are often hitched 



to a sled, and they are guided 
wholly by the voice of their master. 

The Spitz Dog is a variety or kind 
of the Esquimaux dog, and is much 
like it, as will be seen in the picture, 
but is a little smaller. It is a very 
pretty and bright dog, but is apt to 
be snappish and is hardly a safe pet 
for children. It is usually white or 
black. Its home is in Pomerania, on 
the coast of the Baltic Sea. 

The Newfoundland Dog, found in 
the island of Newfoundland and in 
Labrador, is larger than the Esqui¬ 
maux dog, and is generally black and 
white, though there are some yel¬ 
low ones. It is handsome, has 
long curly hair, a bushy tail, large 
hanging ears, and bright eyes. It 
is very strong, is intelligent, kind, 
and trusty, and is one of the best of 
water dogs. Many stories are told 
of the brightness of Newfoundland 
dogs, and many children, and even 
grown people, have been saved from 
drowning by them. 

A gentleman who was spending 
the summer at a seaside watering- 
place in Ireland, was accustomed to 
walk in the evening along the quay 
with a fine Newfoundland dog. The 


dog delighted to play in the water, 
and his master often sent him in to 
fetch things, to the great amusement 
of the people who gathered on the 
quay to see him swim and dive. 
Captain, for this was the dog’s 
name, soon became a great pet, and 
every one used to watch eagerly 
for his coming. One day another 
gentleman, a major in the army, 
came, bringing with him two bull¬ 
dogs of great size and strength. On 
the first day the new dogs took no 
notice of Captain, who swam and 
dived in his usual way ; but on the 
second evening, when he was fol¬ 
lowing his master along the quay, 
one of the brutes flew at him and 
caught him by the neck, and though 
Captain fought bravely, the bull-dog 
came off the victor, and could not 
be made to give up his hold until his 
jaws were forced open with an iron 
bar. Poor Captain went home limp¬ 
ing and bleeding, and did not come 
to the water side again for several 
days ; and when he did appear he 
looked much crestfallen, and stuck 
close to his master’s heels, with his 
tail between his legs. One evening 



Head of Newfoundland Dog. 

about ten days after the fight, the 
major and his bull-dogs stopped 
close by the edge of the quay to look 
at something in the water. Cap¬ 
tain, who was just then passing with 
his master, saw that his time had 
come, and springing with all his 






DOG 


179 


DOG 


strength upon his conqueror, caught 
him by the back of the neck and 
jumped with him into the sea. The 
bull-dog could do but little in the 
water, for Captain kept his head 
under all the time. The people 
were glad to see the bull-dog pun- 



Head of Saint Bernard Dog. 


ished and would not give him any 
aid. The major shouted : “ My 

dog ! my beautiful dog ! will no one 
save him?” But no one stirred. At 
last, seeing that his dog was drown¬ 
ing, he called out : ‘‘I will give fifty 
pounds ($250) to any one who will 
save my dog !” Then some men 
went out in a boat and rescued the 
bull-dog, which was so nearly 
drowned that it was with great diffi¬ 
culty brought to itself again. Cap¬ 
tain swam in triumph to the shore, 
amid the shouts of the people, who 
rejoiced with him in his victory over 
the ugly brute. 

The Saint Bernard Dog is much 
like the Newfoundland in looks, as 
will be seen from the picture above. 
These dogs get their name irom 
the monastery of Saint Bernard, in 
the Alps, between Switzerland and 
Savoy. The monastery is on the 
highest part of the road across the 
mountains, 8000 feet above the sea, 
and is the highest house in Europe. 
Here monks live with their dogs all 
the year round, and do a great deal 
of good by saving the lives of trav¬ 


ellers lost in the snow. After a 
snow storm these dogs go out, car¬ 
rying food, wine, and clothing 
strapped to them, and search for 
lost people. When they find any 
one buried in the snow-drifts they 
dig him out, and bark for the 
monks to come and help them. 
Many lives have been saved in this 
way. It is said by some that the old 
breed of dogs kept at Saint Bernard 
have all died out, and that the dogs 
now kept there are yellow short 
haired ones with very large feet. 

The Greyhound does not belong 
among the true hounds, though it is 
much like them in some things. It 
hunts game by sight, and not by 
scent or smell, like other hounds. It 
has a very long body and neck, and 
long slim legs, so that it stands 
quite high. Its nose is also very 
long and slim, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture. This dog is thought to have 
come from western Asia, and some 
of the largest ones are still to be found 
in Persia and Tartary. These 
greyhounds have long shaggy hair, 
but the large English greyhound, 
and the Italian greyhound, which is 
small and very slender and much 
kept as a pet by ladies, are smooth 
haired. 

Among the true hounds are the 
bloodhound, the staghound, the 



foxhound, the pointer, the setter, 
and the spaniel. The Bloodhound 
is a large strong dog, which was 
much used in olden times in England 
in hunting and in chasing criminals, 
and even enemies in war. It does 
not follow by sight, but merely by 






DOG 


180 


DOG 


the sense of smell, and gets its name 
because it will follow a wounded 
animal by the scent of its blood 
spilled on the earth. It will also 
smell the footsteps of an animal or 
a man, and chase it, even if other 
animals have gone along the same 



path. In the times of the wars be¬ 
tween England and Scotland, blood¬ 
hounds, or sleuth-hounds, as they 
were called, from the Scotch word 
sleuth , meaning the track or trail of 
a deer, were much used in chasing 
cattle-stealers and other thieves on 
the borders. The Buccleugh family 
kept many of the breed, and Sir 
Walter Scott, in his “ Lay of the 
Last Minstrel,” tells how the young 
heir of Buccleugh was lost in the 
wood, 

“ Until he heard the mountains round 
Ring to the baying of a hound, 

And hark ! and hark ! the deep-mouthed bark 
Comes nigher still, and nigher : 

Bursts on the path a dark bloodhound, 

His tawny muzzle tracked the ground, 

And his red eye shot fire.” 

We also read in the chase of Fitz 
James, told so well in the “ Lady of 
the Lake,” how 

“ Two dogs of black St. Hubert’s breed, 
Unmatched for courage, breath, and speed, 
Fast on his flying traces came, 

And all but won the desperate game ; 

For scarce a spear’s length from his haunch. 
Vindictive toiied the bloodhounds staunch.” 


These famous black bloodhounds, 
called St. Hubert’s, are supposed to 
have been brought by pilgrims from 
the Holy Land. Another larger 
breed, also called St. Hubert’s, but 
more highly prized than the black 
ones, were pure white. Still 
another kind was reddish gray. 
The bloodhounds of the present day 
are probably a mixture of all these 
breeds. 

When a bloodhound was chasing 
a man, the only way to stop him 
was to pour blood on the track ; for 
the hound was confused by the fresh 
smell and would no longer follow the 
old scent. In the old times, when 
soldiers were closely followed by a 
hound, a prisoner was sometimes 
killed to throw the dog off the scent. 
It is said that Wallace, when forced 
to retreat with only sixteen men 
after a battle, killed a man to escape 
from his enemies, who were follow¬ 
ing him with a bloodhound. When 
the dog reached the body and smelled 
the fresh blood, he would go no 
further. Bloodhounds were used by 
Henry VIII. in the wars in France, 
by Queen Elizabeth against the Irish, 
and by the Spaniards in Mexico and 
Peru. 



Head of Cuban Bloodhound. 


The true bloodhound has long 
hanging ears. The dog called blood¬ 
hound in Cuba, formerly much used 
in tracking runaway slaves, is not a 
real bloodhound, but is probably a 
descendant of the mastiff, crossed 
perhaps with the bull-dog. Its 




DOG 


DOG 


181 


ears, as will be seen in the picture, 
are pointed and stand up, as in the 
mastiff and the bull-dog. 

The Staghound, the noble animal 
kept in old times for hunting deer, 
is part bloodhound and part grey¬ 
hound. It is a little smaller than 
the real bloodhound, and, like it, has 
hanging ears, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture. The staghound is the dog so 
often painted by Sir Edwin Land¬ 
seer. 

It is not now very common, but 
long ago, when stag hunting was a 
royal sport, the staghound was the 
companion of nobles and always had 
his place by the hall fire. Sir Wal¬ 



ter Scott makes the minstrel sing of 
Branksome Hall : 

“ The tables were drawn, it was idlesse all; 
Knight, and page, and household squire, 
Loitered through the lofty hall, 

Or crowded round the ample fire : 

The staghounds, weary with the chase, 

Lay stretched upon the rushy floor, 

And urged, in dreams, the forest race. 

From Teviot-stone to Eskdale-moor.” 

The modern English Foxhound is 
thought to be only a smaller kind of 
staghound, the only difference be¬ 
tween them being that the one is 
trained to hunt the fox and the other 
the stag. 

The Pointer gets its name from 
its habit of stopping and pointing 
with its nose at game. This is very 
useful to the hunter when looking 
for birds in tall grass. As soon as 
the dog sees a bird, he stands still, 


holding his breath, and pointing at 
the game. If the bird run, he 
creeps after it slowly and carefully, 
always keeping his eye on it, and 



stopping now and then for fear he 
shall start it up too soon ; and he 
takes great delight when at last the 
bird is shot and he sees it at his 
master’s feet. The pointer is short 
haired, and has a head much like 
that of the hound, with long hanging 
ears, as in the picture. 

The Setter gets its name from a 
similar habit, only it sits instead of 
stands when pointing at game. It is 
thought to be part pointer and part 
spaniel, as its figure is something 
between the two. Its hair is long 
and silky, not so smooth as that of 
the pointer, but wavy like that of the 



spaniel. The setter is a better wa¬ 
ter dog than the pointer. 

The Spaniel is supposed to have 
first come from Spain, from which it 





DOG 


182 


DOG 


gets its name. It is a very old 
breed, and was well known to the 
Romans. The form of the spaniel 
is much like that of the setter, but 



Head of Spaniel. 

the body is smaller. Its fur is long, 
silky, and curly, and its ears are 
large and hanging. It loves the wa¬ 
ter, has a strong scent, and makes a 
fine hunting dog. There is a kind 
called the water spaniel, much used 
in hunting ducks. Some spaniels are 
very small, especially those called 
King Charles spaniels, from Charles 
I., who loved to keep these little 
dogs about him. 

The Mastiff is a very large dog, 
with a broad head, and strong neck 
and limbs. The picture gives a 



very good idea of the mastiff’s 
face. This kind of dog lived in Eng¬ 
land before Caesar invaded the island 
(55 b.c.). It was much prized by 


the Romans on account of its great 
courage, and was used by them in 
the sports of the circus, being 
matched to fight with different wild 
animals, sometimes even with the 
lion. Alexander the Great brought 
mastiffs to Greece with him, when 
he came back from India. These are 
supposed to have been the great 
mastiffs of Thibet, which are the 
fiercest of their kind. 

The BulbDog is supposed to be a 
smaller kind of mastiff. It is more 
solidly formed than the mastiff, and 
has a broader and thicker head. 
The ears are commonly cut pointed, 
and made to stand up, as shown in 
the picture, but droop a little when 



not clipped. The bull-dog came 
from England, and it is so called be¬ 
cause it was once much used in bull¬ 
fighting. 

The Bull Terrier is a small kind 
of bull-dog, probably a cross be¬ 
tween the bull-dog and the terrier. 
It is more lively than the bull-dog, 
and takes great delight in rat hunt¬ 
ing. 

The Terrier gets its name from its 
following game into burrows in the 
earth (Latin terra). It is a sleek, 
bright, little dog, with a fine form, 
long legs, a sharp eye and ear, and 
a quick sense of smell. Its color is 
usually black, with tan-colored legs, 
and a tan-colored spot over each 
eye. It is sometimes called the 





DOG 


183 


DOG 


English terrier, or simply the black 
and tan terrier. 

The Scotch Terrier is a little 
fuller in the face, has a stouter body 



and shorter legs, and is covered with 
shaggy wiry hair. It is usually of a 
sandy yellow color, but is sometimes 
white. Its ears stand up, and its 
hearing, smell, and sight are very 
sharp. The .Skye terrier, so called 
from the island of Skye, one of the 
Hebrides, where it is raised, is much 
like the Scotch terrier, but uglier, its 
face being almost covered with hair. 
Terriers are much used in hunting 
for driving foxes and other game out 
of their holes, and also for rat kill¬ 
ing. 

The Scotch terrier, though not 
handsome, is very quick and bright, 
as the following story will show. A 
gentleman of London had a farm, 
about sixty miles from the city, 
where he kept a large mastiff and a 
Scotch terrier. On going to the 
city once for the winter he took with 
him the terrier, who travelled with 
the servants in a carriage. On ar¬ 
riving in London the terrier was put 
into the stable, where a large New¬ 
foundland dog was kept as a watch 
dog. This big fellow, who seemed 
to look upon himself as master 
there, did not show any pleasure at 
the sight of the little dog, and after 
a few days gave him a sound thrash¬ 
ing. The terrier, who seemed to be 
much grieved at this unfriendly treat¬ 


ment, crept away into a corner of 
the stable and kept very quiet 
through the night. The next morn¬ 
ing he was missing, and though 
search was made he could not be 
found anywhere, and he was given 
up for lost. But on the third morn¬ 
ing after his disappearance he came 
into the stable, followed, to every¬ 
body’s surprise, by his old friend the 
big mastiff from the farm. This 
great fellow at once flew at the 
Newfoundland dog and gave him a 
terrible beating, while the little ter¬ 
rier sat by and looked on with the 
greatest pleasure. As soon as the 
mastiff had revenged the wrongs of 
his little friend, he trotted out of the 
stable and was seen there no more. 
It was afterward found out that the 
terrier had gone back to the farm 
and brought the mastiff up to Lon¬ 
don to whip the town bully, and that 
the mastiff, after avenging his old 
friend, had returned home again to 
the farm. 

Another terrier, named Rory, used 
to despise lap-dogs, and took great 
delight in frightening them. One day 
he saw a fat old lady with a very fat 
lap-dog waddling along behind her. 
He trotted along beside it, looking at 
it for a little while, and then gave it 
a pat and rolled it over on its back. 



Head of Scotch Terrier. 


The old lady screamed and snatched 
up her pet and put it on her muff, 
when Rory walked along on his hind 
legs, which he had been taught to 






DOG 


184 


DOLL 


do, and kept snapping at the little 
dog, to her great terror. She struck 
at him with her boa or fur tippet, 
but Rory caught it in his mouth and 
ran off with it down the street, wild 
with delight, every now and then 
rolling over it heels over head. 

The Poodle (German pudel) dog 
first came from Germany, but is 
now common in almost all countries. 
It is a water dog, is very bright, and 
may be taught many smart tricks. 
An English gentleman was once 
crossing one of the bridges over the 
Seine in Paris, when he felt some¬ 
thing rub against his feet, and look¬ 
ing down he saw that a small poodle 
had covered his boots with mud. 
He was very angry, but the dog 
ran away, and the gentleman, when 
he had crossed over the bridge, 
had his boots cleaned at a boot¬ 
black’s stand. Some days after he 
had to cross the bridge again, and 
the same thing happened. Thinking 
that this was odd, he stopped and 
watched the dog for a while. He 
saw him rub against several gentle¬ 
men’s feet till he had got off all the 
mud from his shaggy coat, then run 
down to the river bank and roll 
himself till his fur was filled again. 
With his new supply he ran back to 
the bridge and daubed the feet of 
passers-by as before. After a time, 
instead of going back to the river, 
he ran across the bridge to the 
boot-black, who petted him as if he 
knew him well. The gentleman 
then saw that the poodle had been 
trained by the boot-black to dirty 
people’s feet so as to make more 
work for him ; and he was so much 
pleased with the brightness of the 
little fellow that he paid his master 
a large price for him and carried 
him to England with him. He took 
him into the country about forty 
miles from the seaside, but the dog 
had been there only a few days when 
he disappeared. Search was made 
and rewards were offered for him, 
but he was not found. Several 
weeks afterward the gentleman got 


a letter from a friend in Paris telling 
him that the little poodle was back 
there again busy at his old trade of 
soiling boots. The little fellow, not 
liking the dulness of country life, 
had gone down to the seaside, and, 
as the gentleman afterward found 
out, had got on board of a steamer 
which landed him at Boulogne, and 
from there he had made his way 
back to his old master in Paris. 

The Shepherd Dog, so called 
because used to watch sheep and to 
protect them from other animals, 
looks something like a wolf. Its 
nose is longer and sharper than that 
of the spaniel, and its ears are pointed 
and standing. Notwithstanding its 
looks, it is faithful and true, and 
takes the best of care of the sheep 
given into its keeping. It drives 
them to and from the pasture, never 
allowing any strange sheep to get 
mixed up with them, and never los¬ 
ing any. In countries where there 
are wolves, it guards the flock while 
feeding, and keeps them together 
much better than the shepherd him¬ 
self could do. Many of these dogs 
are now used in California, where 
sometimes one may see thousands 
of sheep without any shepherd, 
watched only by half a dozen faith¬ 
ful dogs. 

The dog is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the dog family to which 
belong also the fox, the wolf, and 
the jackal. 

The word dog probably comes 
from the Danish and Swedish dogge., 
In the Icelandic language it is doggr. 

DOLL. The word doll means a 
bunch of rags, and it is probable 
that dolls were made of rolled-up 
rags in the most ancient times, just 
as children make them to-day. Dolls 
of baked clay, of wood, and of other 
things have been found in Egypt in 
tombs, where they had lain buried 
since before the time of Christ. One 
of these is shown in the picture. 

Dolls are now much more carefully 
made than they were in former times, 




DOLL 


185 


DOLLS 


and a great deal of skill is needed in 
their manufacture. Most of those 
sold in the stores come from Ger¬ 
many and France. In the little town 
of Sonneberg, in Germany, hundreds 
of thousands of dolls and wooden 
toys are made every year. Most of 
the dolls are made out of papier 
MACHE ; but many fine ones are 
made with wax or china heads, and 
a great many cheap ones are made 
out of wood. Papier mache, wax, 
and china heads are all made in the 
same way. All dolls of the same size 
which have like faces are made in 
one mould ; and there have to be as 
many moulds as there are different 
kinds of faces. In making 
a doll, the first thing is to 
get a model, or figure, of 
the exact size and shape of 
the head, for a pattern. 
This is made by a skilful 
workman called the mod¬ 
eller. The modeller sets 
a lump of soft clay on his 
table, the top of which 
turns round and can be 
raised up or lowered as 
he wishes it, and carves 
and shapes it into the 
form of a doll’s head, 
making the face as perfect 
as he can. When done it 
is dried hard, and it then 
goes to another work¬ 
man called the mould¬ 
er. The moulder lays the model, 
face upward, in a dish of wet clay, 
and packs more wet clay round it 
until one half the model is covered. 
He then builds a wall of clay round 
it, some inches higher than the 
face, so that when done the whole 
looks like a box half full of wet clay, 
with a doll’s face sticking out at 
the bottom. Enough melted sul¬ 
phur is then poured into the box to 
cover the face. When this cools it 
becomes hard and makes a mould 
of the doll’s face. The clay is next 
taken away, the model turned over, 
and a mould of the back of the head 
is made in the same way. Thus a 


mould of the whole head and shoul¬ 
ders is made in two parts, one form¬ 
ing the face and the other the back 
of the head. 

The moulds now go to another 
room where a workman is rolling 
out papier mache, or paper pulp 
made into a kind of dough, into 
loaves like bread. The pulp has a 
little clay mixed with it to make it 
stiffer, and a little glue to make it 
more sticky. Another workman 
rolls it into sheets a little thicker 
than pie-crust, cuts it into pieces of 
the right size, and piles them up 
with some powdered clay between to 
keep them from sticking together. 
Still another workman takes these 
pieces, one at a time, and fits them 
into the moulds, pressing them in 
with his fingers, and then passes 
them to a man next to him, who with 
a kind of tool fits them carefully 
into every part. After the edges 
have been pared off evenly with a 
knife, each half mould is taken out 
and dried. The two parts are then 
glued together, and thus the whole 
doll’s head is made of stiff paper. 

It now looks much like common 
gray pasteboard, and has no eyes 
and no hair. The eye-setter first 
cuts off the top of the head with a 
sharp knife, and then cuts a hole 
for each eye. In common dolls the 
eyes are merely glued in, but in the 
better kind of dolls which open 
and shut their eyes the eyes are 
hung on a bent wire with a piece of 
lead at the end, the weight of which 
causes them to move when the doll 
is moved. A piece of cork is put in 
for the lead to hit against, and 
some plaster and pieces of wood to 
strengthen the head, and the top 
which was cut off is then glued on 
again. 

After the bits of glue and any 
other rough things have been 
smoothed off, the doll goes to the 
waxer, who dips it head-foremost 
into a kettle of boiling white bees¬ 
wax. Cheap dolls are dipped but 
once, but fine ones get several coats 
















DOLLS 


186 


DOME 


of wax. The head next goes to the 
painting room, where one workman 
paints it all over with flesh color, 
another paints the lips, a third the 
eyebrows, a fourth the cheeks, and 
a fifth the eyelashes. But some 
dolls have eyebrows and eyelashes 
of real hair. 

The next thing is to put on the 
hair. Some dolls have real hair 
made like a wig with lace under it, 
which is glued on to the head. It is 
then dressed like a live person’s 
hair. But in many the hair is made 
of wool, which is braided up tight 
and boiled to make it stay wavy. 
China and wood dolls have their 
hair only painted. 

The bodies of dolls are made of 
cloth or leather, and are commonly 
stuffed with sawdust, but in dolls 
that cry they are stuffed with hay, 
because the sawdust would be apt 
to get into the crying part and stop 
it up. The crying is made by a 
kind of bellows, which works when 
pressed by the fingers, like that 
which makes a toy cat mew. The 
hands and feet are made in the same 
way as the head, and all are glued 
on to the body. The last thing is the 
dressing. Cheap dolls have only a 
single dress made by a sewing ma¬ 
chine, but the better kind of dolls are 
dressed in fashionable clothes by 
dolls’ dressmakers, who make a 
business of it. It takes thirty or 
forty different persons to make a 
single doll, as each one does only 
one thing ; but many more can be 
made in a day in this way than if 
each workman made a whole doll. 

China dolls are made in the same 
way as those of papier mache, only 
the dough pressed into the moulds 
is china clay instead of paper pulp. 
There are also real wax dolls, whose 
heads are all wax, and whose hairs 
are fastened in one by one instead 
of being glued on. Some are made 
to say papa and mamma, when 
different strings are pulled. Such 
dolls have very beautiful wardrobes 
and are very expensive, often cost¬ 



ing several hundred dollars apiece. 
Common wooden jointed dolls are 
made mostly in Germany, by poor 
people who whittle them out by 
hand. 

Dolls used by East Indian chil¬ 
dren are very different from any in 
this country. They are 
all made of wood paint¬ 
ed with different colors, 
and are all like the one 
in the picture. They 
differ only in size, some 
being not more than six 
inches high, and some 
as tall as a small boy. 

Each doll has a baby in 
its arms and is fixed to 
a wooden block so that 
it can stand up. Its 
clothes are only painted 
wood, its arms are not 
jointed, and the only 
thing which can be 
taken off is the head, 
which is fastened into 
the body by a peg. 

In Japan children Doll, 
have every year what 
is called a “feast of dolls.” This 
is held only on one day of the year, 
at which time all the dolls that 
have belonged to the family are 
brought out from the safe places 
where they are usually kept, and 
put upon tables with many kinds of 
playthings. Sometimes there are 
more than a hundred dolls, some of 
which are dark with age, for often 
dolls two hundred years old are 
shown at this feast. They are 
dressed in all sorts of ways, some 
like mikados and tycoons, as the 
old rulers of Japan were called, some 
like court ladies and gentlemen, and 
some like common ladies and gen¬ 
tlemen. Some of these dolls are 
very small, and some as large as a 
little girl. Though the feast of dolls 
lasts only one day, the toys are 
shown for several days, and are then 
put away until the next year. 

DOME, the rounded cover or roof 
of a building. The Italians call the 


















DOVETAIL 


187 


DRAGON-FLY 


principal church in a town duomo , 
because the churches in Italy were 
once almost all covered with 
domes, and the name was in lime 
given to both the building and its 
roof. The Germans also still call a 
cathedral church a dom. Some ar¬ 
chitects give the name of dome to 
the outside or convex part of the 
roof, and call the inside or concave 
part the cupola ; but with others 
the words cupola and dome are used 
to mean the same thing. The Ro¬ 
mans were the first to put domes on 
buildings, and that on the Pantheon 
in Rome is still the finest and larg¬ 
est one in the world, it being 142 
feet in diameter or width. The next 
largest dome in the world is that of 
the reading-room of the British Mu¬ 
seum (140 feet), and after that come 
those of the Duomo in Florence and 
St. Peter’s in Rome (each nearly 139 
feet), that of St. Sophia in Constan¬ 
tinople (115 feet), and that of the 
Capitol in Washington (nearly 95 
feet). 

DOVETAIL, a kind of joint for 
fastening boards tightly to each 
other, used in making boxes, bureau 
drawers, etc. The end of one board 
is cut like A in the picture, and the 
other is cut like B, 
so that the one will 
fit into the other. 
If you look at a 
bureau drawer, you 
will see how this is. 
If the boards were 
only nailed togeth¬ 
er they might pull 
apart, but when 
fastened with this joint they cannot 
be drawn apart. Such a joint is 
sometimes used, instead of the 
mortise and tenon joint, to join 
one beam to another, but not very 
often. 

The dovetail gets its name from 
its shape, which is like that of a 
dove’s tail spread out. 

DOWEL, a pin of wood or metal 
used for joining two pieces of 
wood, stone, etc., together. Parts 



Dovetails. 


thus fastened are said to be dow- 
elled, and the joint thus made is 
called a dowel-joint. The heads of 
barrels and casks are usually dow- 
elled, as shown in the picture. 
Metal dowels are used in stone¬ 
work, to keep cut stones in place. 




< 

-5- < 

r 1' 

ft 




< 

... i 


Dowels. 


The word dowel is perhaps from 
the French douelle , a socket or hole 
for a peg or pin. 

DOWN, the fine soft feathers of 
birds, especially on the breasts of 
water birds, such as the duck, 
goose, and swan. The best down 
is got from the nests of the eider 
DUCK. Some is taken from the 
breasts of birds which have been 
killed ; this is called dead down and 
is not so good as nest down, which 
live birds pull off with their bills 
from their own breasts, and is 
therefore called live down. Down 
is so soft that a great deal of it can 
be packed in a small space. It is 
sent from the countries where it is 
got in balls about as large as a 
man’s fist, each weighing three or 
four pounds ; but it is so elastic or 
springy that when one of these balls 
is spread out and warmed over hot 
coals it will swell up into enough to 
fill a bed large enough for two per¬ 
sons. But eider down is used gen¬ 
erally only to stuff bed-quilts with, 
and not to sleep upon, as it easily 
becomes matted down. What is 
called gray down or white down 
comes from common geese, and 
not from eider ducks. 

The English word down comes 
from the Icelandic word dun , which 
means the same. 

DRAGON • FLY. This insect is 
easily known by its large head and 
















DRAGON-FLY 


188 


DRAGON-FLY 


chest, its four great wings, and its 
long slender abdomen, which tapers 
out behind much like a darning- 
needle, and from which it is common¬ 
ly called “devil’s darning-needle.” 
But it is not worthy of so bad a 
name, as it is entirely harmless, and 
never bites nor stings. It is also 
called the mosquito hawk, because it 
lives mostly on mosquitoes, of which 
it kills and eats great numbers. It 
also eats flies and other insects, and 
is therefore of great service to us, 
and ought to be welcomed instead of 


driven away. Its prey is always 
caught on the wing, by means of its 
claws, and not with its mouth. 

Dragon-flies pass through three 
stages or changes in life, two in the 
water, and one in the air. The eggs 
are laid in little bunches on the 
leaves and stems of water plants, 
just under the surface of the water. 
The larva, or insect, when first 
hatched from the egg, is brownish, 
and has six legs. The one in the 
picture, marked a , is full-grown. 
The pupa, or second stage, is 



Changes of the Dragon-Fly. 

a, Larva; b , Pupa ; c y Perfect Insect coming out of Pupa-case ; d, Full-grown 

Dragon-fly. 


shown in b, where can be seen the 
jaws or nippers with which insects 
and even small fish are caught. 
These nippers are fastened to a mov¬ 
able stem, and when not in use can 
be folded over the face so as to 
partly cover it. For this reason it is 
called a ‘ ‘ mask. ’ ’ When an insect 
comes near, the nippers can be 
quickly stretched out to seize it and 
carry it to its mouth. The young 
of the dragon-fly live nearly a year 
in the water, where they breathe as 
fishes do, only the breathing place is 


at the end of the tail instead of near 
the head. They creep along on the 
bottom and also move through the 
water by spirting water out from be¬ 
hind, which pushes them along just 
as the stream of fire from the end of 
a rocket forces it up into the air. 

When the time comes for the 
dragon-fly to enter upon the third 
stage, the pupa crawls up out of the 
water and fastens itself to the stem 
of some water plant. The skin 
which covers it then splits along the 
back, and the full-formed winged in- 























DREDGE 


189 


DRILL 


sect creeps slowly out, as shown in c. 
The wings soon dry, and in about 
an hour the dragon-fly, d, mounts 
into the air, where it passes a merry 
life of a few short weeks. Tennyson 
describes this last change very pret¬ 
tily : 

“ To-day I saw the dragon-fly 
Come from the wells where he did lie. 

An inner impulse rent the veil 
Of his old husk ; from head to tail 
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. 

He dried his wings : like gauze they grew: 
Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew, 

A living flash of light he flew.” 

The dragon-fly belongs to the 
order neuroptera , or membrane¬ 
winged INSECTS. 

DREDGE. Rivers and harbors 
are apt to become clogged up with 
mud, sand, and gravel, brought in 
by the tides and currents. As these 
fill the channels and make it hard 



for large vessels to enter them, 
means have to be taken to clear 
them out. Different kinds of scoops 
or buckets have been used for dig¬ 
ging up and raising the mud, but the 
dredge or dredging machine most 
used now is a kind of frame, which 
may be raised or lowered through 
a long box made in the middle of a 
scow. In the picture the front half 
of the scow is shown cut away so 
that the working of the dredge can 
be seen. At each end of the frame 
is a roller, around which an endless 
chain is made to work, and on this 
chain are fastened many iron 


scoops. One end of the frame is 
let down into the water through the 
bottom of the scow until it touches 
the mud. The endless chain is then 
made to turn round the rollers by 
means of a steam engine, and the 
scoops scoop up the mud. As each 
scoop is filled, it comes up on the 
chain, dumps its load, and then 
passes down on the under side of 
the rollers to bring up more mud. 
Thus the scoops come up one after 
the other without stopping, each 
bringing its load and dumping it, and 
thus raising a great deal of mud in 
a short time. The mud falls into a 
trough, through which it runs into 
another scow placed alongside the 
dredge. 

Another kind of dredge is made 
like two scoops with teelh on the 
edges. When let down into deep 
water, it settles into the mud and 
sand, the teeth shut together, and it 
is then raised up, bringing in it 
stones, shells, gravel, and mud. 
The dredge is then swung found by 
means of a crane until it is over 
the scow, when the teeth open and 
let the load fall out. A small 
dredge, made in nearly the same 
way, and worked sometimes by 
hand and sometimes by steam, is 
used to gather oysters from their 
beds. 

Scientific men use instruments 
called dredges to raise from the 
bottom of the ocean animals and 
plants whose habits they wish to 
study. These are not like harbor 
dredges, but are small scrapers fitted 
with nets and other things to catch 
whatever they touch when dragged 
over the bottom. Such dredges are 
also very useful in laying ocean 
telegraphs, for by means of them it 
can be found whether the bottom is 
fit for the cable to lie on. 

The word dredge is from the 
Dutch dregghe, a drag for loosening 
mud at the bottom of rivers, which 
was first used by the Dutch. 

DRILL, a tool used for boring 
holes in metals and other hard sub- 




















DRILL 


DRILL 


190 


stances, such as horn, bone, ivory, 
etc. There are many forms and 
sizes of drills. They are usually 
made of steel wire or 
of steel rods, flatten¬ 
ed and pointed at the 
end used for cutting, 
but some have a cut¬ 
ting edge like an awl. 
Drills are used some¬ 
thing like augers, but 
most of them turn 
only half way round 
in the hole and then 
back again, cutting 
both ways. They 
are made to turn in 
several ways. The 
Fig. 1.—Watch- drill used b Y watch¬ 
maker’s Drill. makers (Fig. 1) is 
worked with a bow. 
The drill, a, has a little pulley near the 
upper end ; and the bow, b, which 
is made of whalebone, has a fine 
catgut or horse-hair string. This 
string is twisted once round the pul¬ 
ley when the drill is to be used. The 
upper end of the drill is then set into 
a little hole made in the watch¬ 
maker’s vice for that purpose, and 
the lower end, or cutting point, is 
set against the work to be drilled, 
which he holds in his left 
hand. By moving the bow 
to and fro, the drill is made 
to turn around quickly, first 
one way and then the other, 
and a hole is thus cut little 
by little into the metal. For 
larger drills a steel or strong 
wooden bow, with a catgut 
string, is used ; or sometimes 
they are turned by rubbing 
them with a flat stick cover¬ 
ed with India-rubber. Such 
drills are held against the 
chest, the workman having 
a flat steel breastplate, in 
which the upper end is put. 
He can thus lean on the drill 
and keep it steady, while 
both hands are free to work. 

In Fig. 2 is shown another kind of 
drill handle, or drill stock, as it is 


called. The upper end, which turns 
round, is held against the chest, and 
the drill is worked by moving up 
and down the nut or ferule, c, 
which works on the screw and 
causes it to turn. All these drills 
are for light work. A third kind of 
drill is shown in Fig. 3. It is called 
the pump-drill, because it is worked 
up and down. It has a shaft or 
spindle, in the bottom of which the 
drill is fastened by a screw. Near 
the lower end of the shaft is a 
wheel, but some have a round ball 
instead. The cross-bar, which has 



Fig. 3.—Pump Drill. 


a hole in it and works up and down 
the shaft, is fastened at each end to 
a string, the middle of which is fast¬ 
ened at the top of the shaft. The 
string is twisted round the shaft, as 
shown in the picture. As the hand 
moves the cross-bar down it unwinds 
the string, and this turns the shaft 
round ; as the cross-bar is moved 
up again the wheel keeps on turning 
and winds up the string again, and 
so on. This kind of drill is used by. 
china menders to drill holes in china 
and glass. A drill working in the 
same way, but having a stone in- 












DRILL 


DRUM 


191 


<tead of a steel point, was used by 
the people of the South Sea and 
Samoan Islands for drilling holes in 
their fish hooks, which were made 
out of shell. The Iroquois and 
some other North American Indians 
used a like instrument for making 
FIRE. 

In Fig. 4 is shown the common 
smith’s brace, used much by black¬ 
smiths. The handle e is turned 
round by the 
hand of the 
workman, and 
the drill, f. is 
kept pressed 
tightly on to 
the piece of 
metal, g, into 
which the hole 
is to be drilled, 
by turning the 
screw, a, at the 
top. Besides 
these, there are 
machines for 
drilling, some 
of which are 
worked by 
hand and some 
by steam- 
power. As 
there is much 
rubbing or fric¬ 
tion in drilling 
Fig. 4,— Smith’s Brace, metals, both 
the work to be 
drilled and the drill itself would get 
very hot if they were not kept 
moist. In drilling most metals oil or 
soap and water is used, but gold 
and silver are sometimes kept wet 
with milk. Very hard steel and 
hard stones are drilled by means of 
copper or soft iron drills used with 
emery powder and oil. Drills fitted 
with diamond points are also used 
with oil for drilling very hard steel. 

The word drill comes from the 
Anglo Saxon thyrl , a hole. 

DROMEDARY. See Camel. 

DRUM, a musical instrument 
played by beating. Drums are 
usually made of thin wood or brass, 



and covered at one or both ends 
with skin. Two kinds are used in 
military bands, the snare drum and 
the bass drum. 



German Snare Drum. 

The Snare Drum, which is some 
times called the side drum, because 
the drummer wears it hanging by 
his side, gets its name from the 
snares or strings stretched across its 
lower end. These, which are 
usually of catgut, tremble when 
the drum is beaten on the upper 
end, and add to its sound. The 
long wooden snare drum is now giv¬ 
ing place to a shorter kind made of 
brass, like the one used in the Ger¬ 
man army, which is shown in the 
picture. 



Kettle Drum. 

The Bass Drum is beaten on both 
ends, and is much larger and makes 
a deeper sound than the snare 























DUCK 


DYES 


192 


drum. It is used chiefly in military 
bands. 

The Kettle Drum is made of thin 
copper or brass, and is shaped like 
a kettle or basin. It is covered over 
the top with skin, and generally 
stands on a tripod, or three-legged 
stand, as shown in the picture. It 
is used chiefly in orchestras, 
though small ones are sometimes 
carried by bands on horseback, like 
those of cavalry regiments. Two 
kettle drums are generally played in 
orchestras, one of which is tuned 
with the other instruments, and the 
other a little higher. 

All kinds of drums have long 
been used among Eastern nations, 
and the instrument is supposed to 
have been first brought into Europe 
by the Moors. 

The word drum was probably 
named from its sound. In Old 
English the word was spelled 
drumme. In old Saxon, drom 
meant a noise. 

DUCK. Ducks have broader bills 
and shorter necks than geese and 
swans, and their legs are much 
shorter and set further back than 
those of geese, so that they walk 
with a more waddling gait. Their 
food too is mostly animal, while 
that of geese and swans is chiefly 
vegetable, and the males differ more 
from the females than is the case 
with swans and geese. 

There are two classes of wild 
ducks, those which live in shallow 
inland waters and rivers, and those 
which live mostly in the ocean and 
seldom go up rivers. These two 
kinds differ in many things, the first 
class, which fly the most, having 
longer wings and necks than the 
second, whose legs are better fitted 
for swimming. Among the most 
common ones of the first kind found 
along the Atlantic coast of the 
United States are the black duck, 
the mallard, the teal, and the widg¬ 
eon. To the second class belong 
the old wife, the velvet and the surf 
duck (both of which are wrongly 


called coot), the red head, and the 
canvas back. 

The Canvas Back, which is the 
most prized of all water fowl, is 
found only in North America. It 
gets its name from its white back, 
most of its other parts being dusky 
red, black, or slate color. The can¬ 
vas backs shot in Chesapeake Bay are 
the best, on account of the food they 
get there, the root of a water plant 
commonly but wrongly called wild 
celery. The ducks dive down to 
the bottom, pull up the roots and 
come up to eat them, throwing away 
the stalks, with which the top of the 
water is strewn. This root gives 
their flesh a fine flavor, and such 
ducks sell much higher than any 
others. 

Other wild ducks feed mostly on in¬ 
sects, worms, snails and other MOL- 
LUSKS,- and small fish. Many kinds 
of both inland and sea ducks spend 
the summer in the arctic regions and 
go south in the winter. Wild ducks 
always live in pairs, but tame ducks 
do not. 

The common domestic or tame 
duck is descended from a wild duck 
belonging to the inland kinds, called 
the mallard. Among the best of 
the tame kinds is the Aylesbury 
duck, which is very large and prized 
for its fine flesh. The Muscovy, 
more properly musk duck, is so 
called because it has an odor of musk 
about it. It also is very large, and 
has a red lump or carbuncle at the 
upper end of the bill. It is sup¬ 
posed to have first come from South 
America. The Chinese hatch great 
numbers of ducks’ eggs in hot sand, 
and bring up the young ducks by 
hand. 

The duck belongs to the order 
7 iatatores , or swimming BIRDS, and 
to the same family with the goose 
and the swan. 

It gets its name from its habit of 
ducking its head under water. 

DYES. The dyeing or coloring of 
cloth is an art which takes a great 
deal of knowledge and skill. If a 




DYES 


193 


DYES 


piece of cotton, woollen, or silk 
cloth be dipped into some kinds of 
dyes and then dried it will be stained 
the color of the dye so that it cannot 
be washed out; but this is not true 
of all dyes. Some need something 
else mixed with them to fix the 
color, and others have to have the 
cloth prepared before it is put into 
the dye. It is the dyer’s business to 
know these things, and to do so he 
has to learn all about the different 
drugs and other substances used for 
dyes, and the nature of the materials 
out of which cloths are made. 

Most of the dyes in use come from 
plants. The coloring matter is got 
sometimes from the roots, some¬ 
times from the stems and bark, and 
sometimes from the flowers and 
seeds. Among the most important 
vegetable dyes are Brazil wood, 

LOGWOOD, MADDER, SAFFLOWER, 
FUSTIC, ANNOTTO, quercitron or 
yellow oak bark, turmeric, in¬ 
digo, SUMAC, ALDER, BARBERRY 
root, and red sandal or sanders 
wood. A few dyes, such as coch¬ 
ineal and LAC, come from ani¬ 
mals ; and a great many substances 
used in dyeing are got from the 
metals and other minerals. Some 
of the most beautiful colors used 
are made out of the coal tar of gas¬ 
works. These are usually called 
aniline colors (Arabic an-nil , the 
indigo plant) because they are made 
from aniline, which is got out of 
coal tar. Aniline is a kind of oily 
liquid, which, when pure, is color¬ 
less ; but when it is mixed with 
different things may be made into a 
great number of beautiful colors. 
Red, yellow, green, blue, and black 
dyes, of many different shades, are 
thus made out of dirty coal tar, 


which used to be thrown away as of 
no value. Among the aniline colors 
are those called magenta, solferino, 
roseine, mauve, azuline, emeraldine, 
bleu de Paris, and Bismarck. 

Besides the dyes, there are other 
substances used in dyeing which fas¬ 
ten the colors to the threads of the 
cloth. These are called mordants 
(French mordant, biting, from Latin 
mordere , to bite), because they bite 
the colors into the cloth so that they 
cannot be washed out. The princi¬ 
pal mordants are ALUM, the SALTS 
of ALUMINUM, tin, and iron, and 
SODA. By the use of different mor¬ 
dants different colors are got from 
the same dye. Thus, madder will 
give a rose tint with one mordant, 
dark red with another, dark brown 
with a third, and black with a fourth. 

Some colors are made by many 
dyeings in different liquids, some of 
which change the tint and some of 
which fix them to the cloth. 

In dyeing cloths they are soaked 
in tubs holding the dyes, then passed 
through squeezers and drying ma¬ 
chines to get all the dampness out 
of the threads, and lastly through 
finishing machines which give them 
a smooth surface. Generally cotton 
and linen are harder to dye than 
wool and silk ; and when cloths are 
made of different things, such as 
mixed goods of cotton and wool, or 
of wool and silk, they have to pass 
through several dyes, some of which 
dye the cotton, some the wool, and 
some the silk. In some mixed goods 
one of the fibres is of one shade of 
color and one of another, because 
the dye which dyes one will not dye 
the other. 

The word dye comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon deag , a dye, a color. 








E 


EACLE. The eagle has a curved 
beak, broad wings, legs feathered 
down to the toes, and strong, sharp, 
curved claws. Its food consists 
of birds, small quadrupeds, and 
sometimes fish. When hungry it 
will kill animals as large as sheep 
and pigs. The eagle is found in 
nearly all parts of the world. It 
lives mostly in wild mountainous 
regions, and builds its nest on high 
cliffs out of reach of its enemies. 

The Golden Eagle, which is found 
all over Europe and America, is 
among the largest of the eagles. It 
is not often seen in the Eastern 
States, but is common in the 
Northwest. Its color is dark 
brown, but the back of the head, 
the neck, and the lower tail feathers 
are brownish yellow, from which it 
gets its name. It is said to live 
more than a hundred years. The 
Indians use its feathers to adorn 
their heads, pipes, and weapons 
with. Its nest is built of sticks, 
usually on some high cliff, and it lays 
two dull white eggs shaded with 
brown. 

The golden eagle carries off many 
lambs, kids, and other small ani¬ 
mals to its nest, during the breeding 
season, to feed its young, and it has 
even been known to seize and fly 
away with a baby. In Scotland two 
children were once stolen by eagles 
in one season, but fortunately the 
theft was seen and both were safely 
rescued by men who climbed up to 
the nests. In Switzerland, where 
eagles build their nests on high 
mountain crags, babies have been 


thus carried off and eaten, and 
only their bones left. Once during 
a famine in Ireland, a poor man got 
food every day for his family by 
watching an eagle’s nest, and tak¬ 
ing from it part of the animals which 
the old birds brought to feed their 
young with. When the young ones 
grew old enough to fly, he clipped 
their wings so that they could not 
leave the nest, and thus kept the 
old ones bringing food much longer 
than they would otherwise have 
done. 

The Bald, or White-headed Eagle, 

as it ought to be called, as its head 
is feathered like all the eagles, is 
the one used as the emblem of the 
United States. It is found almost 
all over North America. It belongs 
properly to the fishing or sea eagles, 
and its usual food is fish, which it 
steals from the fish hawk. When 
it sees this bird catch a fish and 
start for the shore to eat it, it pur¬ 
sues and forces it to drop it, and 
then swoops down and catches it 
before it reaches the earth. Like 
the golden eagle, the bald eagle 
lives to a great age. Its plumage is 
dark brown, with head, neck, and 
tail white. It builds its nest usually 
on high trees, and lays two dull 
white eggs. 

The eagle was the emblem of an¬ 
cient Rome, and is now the em¬ 
blem of the Austrian and Russian 
empires, and of the United States. 
The Austrian and Russian eagles 
are made with two heads, in imita¬ 
tion of the double-headed eagle first 
used by Constantine the Great, one 


194 



EAGLE 


195 


EAR 


of the heads of which meant the 
Western Empire, and the other the 
Eastern Empire. 

The eagle belongs to the order 
raptores , or birds of prey, and to 
the falcon family. 

The word eagle is from the Latin 
aqiiila , eagle. 

EAGLE, a gold coin of the United 
States, worth ten dollars. It was 
first coined in 1795. The half eagle 
was first made in the same year, 
the quarter eagle in 1796, and the 
double eagle in 1849. These coins 
are not pure gold (see Alloy). 

The eagle was named from the 
emblem of the United States, the 
bald EAGLE. 

EAR. In the article SOUND it is 
told that there is no such thing as 
sound outside of the ear, but that 
what we commonly call sound is 
carried in a series of waves to the 
ear, inside of which there is certain 
machinery which makes us hear. 
The ear is made up of three differ¬ 
ent parts, which may be easily un¬ 



derstood by the picture. This pic¬ 
ture is not exactly like the ear, but 
is only a diagram, or plan, to show 
how it works. The first part is 
made up of the outside ear, A, and 
the pipe, B, which leads inward. 
The outside part of the ear is much 
like the open part of wind instru¬ 
ments, or of a speaking trumpet, 
and serves to gather the sound waves 
and turn them into the pipe B. 
This pipe, which is a little more than 
an inch long, is stopped by a skin, 
C, which is stretched tightly across 
it. Behind this skin, which is called 
the membrane or skin of the drum 


(Latin membrana tympani), is the 
second or middle chamber of the 
ear, D, called the drum (Latin tym¬ 
panum), which is filled with air by a 
pipe, E, opening into the mouth. 
The drum is hollowed out of the 
bone of the skull, and its inner open¬ 
ing, called the oval window, is closed 
by another skin, G. Beyond this is 
the third or inner chamber of the 
ear, H, which has in it little canals 
and a winding passage like that of a 
snail shell. This inner chamber is 
filled with a watery fluid, in which 
floats the acoustic or hearing nerve, 
made up of a bundle of fine cords. 
These cords are finally gathered into 
one nerve, I, which leads to the 
brain. 

When sound waves are collected 
by the outer ear, they pass through 
the pipe B, and striking upon the 
skin of the drum, C, cause that to 
vibrate or quiver with exactly the 
same kind of motion. These vibra¬ 
tions or quiverings are carried 
through the middle chamber, D, to 
the second skin, G, stretched over 
the oval window. From this they 
go to the liquid which fills the inner 
ear, and the acoustic nerve, floating 
in this, gathers them up and carries 
them to the brain. 

Within the drum (D) of the ear 
is a chain of four little bones, too 
small to be shown in the picture, 
which reach from the middle of the 
skin (C) of the drum to the skin (G) 
of the oval window. These carry 
the sound waves from the first to 
the second skin. One of them, 
named the lenticular bone, because 
it is shaped some like a lens, is the 
smallest bone in the body. The 
three others are called, also from 
their shape, the hammer, the anvil, 
and the stirrup. Of these the ham¬ 
mer is fastened to the skin of the 
drum and the stirrup to the skin of 
the oval window. The air in the 
drum of the ear also helps to carry 
the sound-waves, but its principal 
use is to make equal the pressure of 
the atmosphere on the skin of the 




EAR 


196 


EARTH 


drum. If there were no air inside, 
the outside air would press too 
heavily on this skin. 

The larger the outside ear is, the 
more are the waves of sound which 
are caught. Therefore, some ani¬ 
mals which have very large ears 
hear much better than man does. 
We could hear better if our ears were 
larger. Sometimes, when we do not 
hear very well, we put up our hand 
to our ear, and this helps us by 
stopping and turning into the ear 
more sound waves. Deaf people 
use an ear trumpet, which answers 
the same purpose. Timid animals, 
such as the rabbit, the hare, and 
the deer, have large ears which they 
can move, so that they can hear in 
every direction. The horse, too, 
can move its ears backward and for¬ 
ward, so as to hear what is coming 
ahead and behind. This makes it a 
more useful animal, for it is quick 
to hear the commands of its master. 
Some persons can move their ears in 
this way, and all can learn to do it. 

The ear is guarded from injury by 
being so placed that its inner parts 
are inclosed in the hardest bone of 
the body. The outer part, which is 
open, might be harmed by insects 
crawling into it, but it too is guarded 
by the wax. This is very bitter, and 
there is probably something in ihe 
smell of it which insects do not like. 
If one by chance goes into the ear, 
it soon becomes covered with the 
sticky wax, and dies after a while, if 
it is not taken out. If an insect 
causes pain in the ear, a little sweet 
oil should be poured in and left there 
until it is smothered. The wax 
sometimes becomes hard, but if left 
to itself it will generally dry and 
scale off. In no case should it be 
picked out with any sharp instru¬ 
ment, as deafness may be caused by 
it. The skin of the drum is easily 
pierced, and if thus injured much 
pain and trouble may come from it. 
If the ear needs cleaning, it should 
be done by syringing it with warm 
water. 


The word ear is from the Anglo- 
Saxon eare , which comes from the 
Latin aurzs, ear. 

EARTH. The earth on which we 
live appears to us to have a nearly 
flat surface, broken here and there 
by hills and valleys, and stretching 
out on all sides until it meets the 
sky ; but we know that it is not flat 
because ships have frequently sailed 
round it. If a ship start from a 
place and keep sailing westward, 
it will in time come to the same 
place from the east side. We can¬ 
not tell the exact shape of the earth 
from this, because if it were square 
a ship could sail round it in the same 
way. But we know from watching 
ships on the sea that the earth is not 
square but rounded. When a ship 
is coming toward us from a distance 
only the masts are seen, and they ap¬ 
pear to grow taller and taller until at 
last the hull comes into view ; and 
when a ship sails away from us, 
the hull first goes out of sight 
and then the masts little by little 
until all is gone. If the sea were 
flat, ships would grow smaller and 
smaller as they sailed further away, 
and would finally disappear alto¬ 
gether ; and if the earth were square, 
they would go out of sight all at 
once, when they reached the edge ; 
but we see that they go out of sight 
little by little, first the lower parts 
and lastly the tops of the masts, and 
we know from this that the earth is 
neither flat nor square, but rounded. 
We can prove too that it is round 
like a ball, because in eclipses of the 
MOON the earth, which then comes 
between the sun and the moon, 
casts a round shadow on the moon, 
just such a shadow as one globe 
would cast on another globe. We 
know also that it is very large, be¬ 
cause we can see vessels for many 
miles before they go down out of 
sight. The earth is, indeed, a great 
ball which measures nearly 8000 
miles (7912) in a line through its 
centre. 

We know, too, that the earth 








EARTH 


IQ7 


EARTH 


hangs in space just as a balloon 
does in the air, because on whatever 
part of it we go we can always see 
the heavens above us, and we know 
that it is all the time spinning round 
like a great top. If we look, on any 
clear night, at the eastern horizon, 
(Greek, from horos> a boundary), or 
place where the earth and sky meet, 
we shall see some stars rising up 
above the edge of the earth, while 
those in the western horizon will be 
going down below the edge of the 
earth. We can see the moon too 
rising in the east and setting in the 
west, and in the daytime the sun 
follows the same course. These look 
like real movements, and the an¬ 
cients believed that the earth stood 
still and that the heavenly bodies 
travelled round it ; but the sun 
and the stars do not really move, 
but only appear to move from east 
to west because the earth is all the 
time turning round from west to 
east. The eastern edge of the earth 
goes down as the western edge 
rises, and thus the sun and stars 
first come into sight in the east and 
are shut out of view in the west. 
As there are about twenty-four hours 
between each sunrise or coming of 
the sun on the eastern edge of the 
world, we know that it takes the 
earth just that time to turn round 
once. This causes day and night, 
for we call it day when the part of 
the earth on which we are spins 
round into the sunlight, and night 
when it has turned so far around as 
to hide the sun from us. As the sun 
is fixed in the heavens, the earth 
must turn round, for if the earth 
too were fixed, the side of it toward 
the sun would always be bright, 
and the side from the sun would al¬ 
ways be dark. But as all sides of 
the earth have their night and their 
day, we know that the earth must 
turn round. 

The spinning round of the earth 
like a top explains many of the mo¬ 
tions of the other heavenly bodies, 
but not all of them, and we are there¬ 


fore led to think that it has some 
other kind of motion. Indeed, we 
know from many things that the 
earth rolls round the sun in a great 
circle called an orbit (see Uni¬ 
verse), travelling round it once in 
365^ days, and this movement makes 
our year, just as the other move¬ 
ment, which we have likened to the 
spinning'' of a top, makes our day. 
Now, if the earth spun round ex¬ 
actly like a top, standing straight up 
and down, and moved round the sun 
in that way, the days would always 
be of the same length all over the 
world, and the seasons would never 
change. But in summer the days 
are much longer than in winter, 
and when it is summer here it is 
winter on the other side of the earth ; 
we therefore know that the motion 
must be in some other way. 

These things can be best shown by 
means of a lamp and an orange. 
Set a lamp in the middle of a round 
table in a dark room. Let the lamp 
stand for the sun and the edge of 
the table for the orbit or path in 
which the earth travels round the 
sun. Then stick a knitting-needle 
through the middle of an orange, to 
stand for the earth ; set it upright 
in a pin-cushion, as shown in the 
picture, Fig. 1, and place the pin¬ 
cushion near the edge of the table. 
Twist the needle so as to make 
the orange turn round in a way 
different from that in which the 
hands of a watch move. You 
will see, as the orange turns round, 
that there are two points on it which 
do not move out of their places, one 
at the top and one at the bottom, 
where the knitting - needle goes 
through. These points are called 
the poles, the one at the top being 
named the north pole, and the one 
at the bottom the south pole. The 
line joining the two poles, and 
around which the orange moves, is 
called the axis. In the orange the 
knitting-needle is the axis, but in 
the earth there is no real axis ; we 
only imagine one for the earth to 





EARTH 


EARTH 


198 


turn round on. Now draw a circle 
round the middle of the orange, 
everywhere at the same distance 
from each of the poles, so as to di¬ 
vide it into two equal parts, and call 
it the equator (Latin cequare, to make 
equal). The part north of the equa¬ 
tor is usually called the northern 
hemisphere (half globe, from Greek 
hemi , half, and sphaira , globe), 
and the part south of the equator the 
southern hemisphere. 

While the orange (earth) is kept 
in the position shown in the picture, 
the lamp (sun) will always shine on 
one half of it, while the other half 
will be in the dark ; and this will' 
be the same if the orange be kept 
spinning round like a top, and be 


also moved round the lamp on the 
edge of the table. The side to¬ 
ward the lamp will always be light, 
and the side from it will always be 
dark ; and if the orange be turned 
steadily all the time, the light side 
will be light just as long as the dark 
side is dark. Thus the lightness 
and the darkness will be divided 
evenly. So in the earth, if the axis 
were straight up and down the 
sun’s light would always shine evenly 
on one half at a time, and the days 
and nights would be of equal length. 

Now, instead of setting the orange 
straight up, as in Fig. 1, set it so 
that the needle will slant, making 
the upper end furthest from the 
lamp, as shown in the second pic¬ 



ture, Fig. 2. If you now twist the 
knitting-needle so as to turn the 
orange round, you will see that the 
light never shines on the part near 
the north pole, and always shines 
on a part round the south pole, while 
the parts round the equator become 
light and dark as the orange turns 
round. 

Stick a pin in the orange about 
half way between the equator and 
the north pole, and call it New 
York. You will see, as it moves 
round the orange, that it has a 
much longer journey on the dark 
side than it has on the light side. 
At New York, therefore, when the 
earth is in the same position to the 
sun as the orange is to the lamp, 


the night is much longer than the 
day. At the same time it is always 
dark at the north pole and always 
light at the south pole. 

Move the pin-cushion and orange 
one fourth way round the table, 
keeping the knitting-needle always 
slanting in the same way. The two 
poles will then be equally distant 
from the sun, and if the orange be 
turned round it will be seen that the 
light strikes both poles at the same 
time, so that the journey of every 
part of the orange through light and 
darkness is equal. When the earth 
is in this position, therefore, the 
days and nights are of the same 
length all over the world. 

Next move the pin-cushion and 













EARTH 


J 99 


EARTH 


orange another fourth way round, 
still keeping the needle slanting in the 
same way ; but, being on the other 



Fig. 2.—Real Slant of the Earth’s Axis. 

side of the lamp, its top, or north 
pole, will slant toward the lamp. 
You will now see that the light 


never shines on the part of the 
orange near the south pole, and al¬ 
ways shines on the part near the 
north pole, while the parts around 
the equator become light and dark, 
as the orange moves round, as be¬ 
fore. The pin which stands for 
New York has now a much longer 
journey round the light side of the 
orange than it has on the dark side. 
At New York, therefore, the day is 
longer than the night. At the same 
time it is always light at the north 
pole and always dark at the south 
pole. 

Move the orange round another 
quarter, and the poles will again be 
equally distant from the sun, so 
that its light will strike on both 


A N 



Fig. 3.—Positions of the Earth in Moving round the Sun. 


poles at the same time, and day and 
night will be again equal. 

Thus the difference in the lengths 
of the days and nights is shown to 
be caused by the different ways in 
which the axis of the earth lies 
toward the sun. The axis always 
slants in the same way, but in mov¬ 
ing round the sun it lies in different 
ways toward it. This will be seen 
in the picture (Fig. 3), where the 
earth is shown in the same four po¬ 
sitions in which the orange has been 
put. In each of these positions the 
earth’s axis is shown with the north 
pole marked N. The sun is in the 
middle, marked S. The axes all slant 
in the same way, but when the earth 
is at A or at C, the two poles are 


the same distance from the sun ; 
when it is at B the north pole is 
tipped toward the sun, and when it 
is at D the north pole is tipped the 
other way, or from the sun. 

It is now easy to understand what 
makes the changes in the seasons. 
When the days are long and the 
nights are short in either the north¬ 
ern or the southern hemisphere, 
the sun shines during so large a part 
of the twenty-four hours that the 
earth gets heated and gives off its 
heat to the air, and this makes sum¬ 
mer. But when the nights are much 
longer than the day, the sun does 
not shine on the earth for so long a 
time, and so it does not get so much 
heat, and this makes winter. In 





EARTH 


200 


EARTH 


the picture, A shows the earth in the 
spring (about March 21st) in the 
northern hemisphere, and in the 
autumn in the southern hemisphere. 
The light of the sun just falls on 
both poles, and in all other parts of 
the earth the days and nights are of 
the same length. As the earth 
moves from A toward B, the light 
shines more and more on the parts 
beyond the north pole, leaving the 
south pole little by little, until at B 
it lights up the parts all round the 
north pole, N, while the parts 
round the south pole are left in 
darkness. It is therefore the long 
day at the north pole, and the long 
night at the south pole, which last 
for half the year, from the time the 
earth is at A until it reaches C. 
When the earth is at B it is summer 
(about June 21st) in the northern 
hemisphere, and winter in the south¬ 
ern hemisphere. At the same time 
it is the middle of the long day at the 
north pole, and the middle of the 
long night at the south pole. As 
the earth travels from B to C the 
light leaves the north pole little by 
little, and begins to move toward the 
south pole, until, when the earth 
reaches C, the sun again shines 
equally on both poles, and in other 
places the days and nights are of the 
same length, just as when the earth 
is at A. When the earth is at C it 
is autumn (about September 23d) in 
the northern hemisphere, and spring 
in the southern hemisphere. As the 
earth moves from C toward D the 
light moves more and more beyond 
the south pole, leaving the north 
pole little by little, and the long day 
of the south pole and the long night 
of the north pole begin. These last 
until the earth gets round to A 
again, when the sun again shines on 
both poles. When the earth is at D 
(about December 21st) it is winter in 
the northern hemisphere, and summer 
in the southern hemisphere. At the 
same time it is the middle of the long 
day at the south pole, and the middle 
of the long night at the north pole. 


We thus see that the days and 
nights are caused by the spinning 
round of the earth on its axis 
once every twenty-four hours ; and 
that the difference in the length of 
the days and nights is caused by the 
different ways in which the axis of 
the earth lies towards the sun as the 
earth travels round the sun in its 
yearly course. We also see that 
the seasons are caused by the differ¬ 
ence in the length of the days and 
nights in different parts of the earth. 
At the two poles there are but one 
day and one night in the whole year. 
At the north pole it is day for six 
months, from about March 21st to 
about September 23d, and night the 
other six months of the year. At 
the south pole it is night when it is 
day at the north pole, and day when 
it is night at the north pole. In all 
other parts of the earth the days and 
the nights are of different lengths, 
excepting about March 21st and 
September 23d, when they are of 
the same length everywhere. For 
several days before and after these 
times we cannot see any difference 
in the lengths of the days and 
nights, because it is only a few min¬ 
utes. 

The earth forms one of the plan¬ 
ets which roll round the sun, and is 
therefore in the solar system, which 
is told about under Universe. It 
has only one satellite, or MOON, 
which rolls round it about once a 
month. It gets its HEAT and its 
light from the sun, the light which 
comes from the moon being only 
reflected LIGHT. It is surrounded 
by a great mass of air, called the 
atmosphere (air-sphere, from Greek 
atmos, air, and sphaira , a sphere), 
which covers it like an envelope, and 
which reaches as much as forty-five 
miles above its surface. The shin¬ 
ing of the sun on the earth heats it, 
and this heats the air and causes 
the WINDS ; it also causes vapor to 
rise into the air, and from it we have 
FOG, CLOUDS, DEW, RAIN, SNOW, 
and HAIL. 







EARTH 


201 


EARTH 


The earth’s surface is made up of 
land and water. There is a great 
deal more water than land ; indeed, 
about three fourths of the surface is 
covered by water. The water is all 
joined in one great body which we 
call the sea ; but the land is much 
broken up by the way the sea runs 
into it, and some parts are cut off 
from the main body of land, so as to 
form islands. The masses of land 
too lie in such a way that the sea is 
cut up into parts. These great 
masses of land are called continents, 
and the parts of the sea lying be¬ 
tween them are called oceans. If 
you look at a globe you will see that 
much more of the land lies north of 
the equator than south of it,, and that 
more of the sea lies on the south 
side than on the north. 

We can see that the surface of the 
land is uneven, broken up into 
mountains, hills, valleys, and plains, 
and we know in various ways that 
the bottom of the sea is very much 
like the land, but some of the valleys 
in the sea are much deeper than the 
height of the highest mountains on 
the land. The deepest parts of the 
sea are furthest from the land, and 
generally it grows shallow toward 
the land ; but even in the middle of 
the sea mountains rise up from its 
bottom and form islands. 

The water of the sea in the middle 
of the ocean is blue, because the 
color of pure water is blue, but nearer 
the land it is greenish, and this be¬ 
comes tinged with brown or yellow 
along the coasts because the waves 
stir up the mud from the bottom or 
wear away earthy matter from the 
shores. In some places the sea has 
other colors from different causes : 
in the Gulf of Guinea it looks white ; 
near Japan, yellow ; in the Red Sea, 
in some parts of the Mediterranean, 
and near California, red ; and round 
the Maidive Islands black. The 
Black Sea is not named from its 
color, but on account of its many 
storms ; and the White Sea gets its 
name from its snow and ice. 


Sea water has a salt and some¬ 
what bitter taste. It is made up 
like other water of oxygen and 
HYDROGEN, but it has besides many 
salts mixed in it, the principal of 
which are common salt (sodium 
chloride), MAGNESIUM, POTASSIUM, 
and CALCIUM. If all the salts in 
the sea were piled up on the conti¬ 
nent of North America they would 
cover it all over with a layer half a 
mile thick. All this great mass of 
mineral matter is washed out of the 
rocks and carried into the sea by 
streams and rivers. The water of 
all springs and rivers has some salt 
in it, and therefore salt is all the time 
being carried in the sea. The water 
of the sea turns into vapor and rises 
into the air, from which a part of it • 
goes back to the land again in the 
form of rain, snow and hail, but the 
salts stay in the sea, and thus the 
water of the sea is always salt. 

It is also getting a little salter all the 
time, but so slowly that we do not 
notice it. 

A good deal of the water which 
falls on the land goes back into 
the air as vapor, but much also set¬ 
tles into the ground. Water sinks 
easily through sand and gravel. 
Some rocks too are so porous, or 
full of little holes, that water passes 
through them, and those which are 
close-grained have many cracks 
through which water runs freely. 
But wherever there is a bed of clay 
the flowing of the water is stopped. 
Therefore sandy soils are dry, but 
clay soils are wet, because they hold 
the water. All the water which goes 
down into the earth comes to the 
surface again, because after trickling 
down through the cracks in the 
earth, perhaps several thousand feet, 
it at last comes to some kind of rock 
through which it cannot pass. It 
then has to stop, but being all the 
time pressed upon by more water 
which follows it down from the sur¬ 
face, it has to try to escape in some 
other way; and so it is driven 
through other cracks up and down 






EARTH 


202 


EARTH 


until it at last comes out on the 
surface again at some place far 
distant from where it went in, and 
breaks out as a spring. In these 
long trips through the rocks which 
make up the earth’s crust, water 
wears away the substance of the 
rocks little by little, and thus gets 
from them the salts useful to the 
life of plants and animals. The 
cracks and crevices in rocks are thus 
enlarged, and in this way large caves, 
sometimes many miles long, have 
been formed in different parts of the 
world. 

■The whole surface of the earth 
too is all the time being worn away 
by the action of water and frost, so 
that all the rocks, the hardest as 
“well, as the softest, are crumbling 
and washing away. The rains carry 
this powdered rock down from the 
hills and scatter it over the earth’s 
surface. Part is collected in hollows 
and on sloping and level ground, 
and part is swept into brooks and 
rivers and carried into the sea, where 
it is made into new rocks. Thus 
the soil of the earth is made, sandy 
soil from sandstone, limey soil from 
limestone, and clayey soil from clay 
rocks ; and thus it is made possible 
for plants to grow and for ani¬ 
mals to live upon the earth. 

In the article Rocks is told how 
the mountains have been formed on 
the earth, but these mountains do 
not look now as they did at first. 
Their tops and sides have been 
wasted away by frost and rains 
which have carved them into cliffs 
and crags, and ravines and valleys 
have been cut out of their rocks by 
the endless flow of brooks and riv¬ 
ers. Thus great mountains have 
been carved into many ridges and 
valleys, and table-lands or highlands 
have been split up into smaller ridges 
and hills, and the soil is swept down 
on to the plains or into the sea. 

The tops of the highest moun¬ 
tains on the earth are always cov¬ 
ered with snow. This is because 
the higher parts of the AIR are very 


cold, and when mountains are lofty 
enough to get into those parts which 
are below the freezing point, the 
vapor condensed from the air falls 
upon them as snow instead of as 
rain. During summer the heat 
melts the snow from the lower parts, 
but does not melt it on the upper 
parts where it is too cold, so that 
there is a line above which the snow 
does not melt. This line, which is 
called the snow line, differs in dif¬ 
ferent parts of the world. In the 
warm countries near the equator it is 
nearly three miles (about 15,000 
feet) above the sea, but at the two 
poles it is almost down to the level 
of the sea. As snow often falls on 
places above the snow line, it would 
soon become piled up very high if 
there were not some way of getting 
rid of it. When there is much snow 
the pressure of that which is above 
squeezes the lower layers into a solid 
mass, which becomes frozen, and 
in time this is crowded slowly down 
some valley until it reaches a point 
where it melts and flows away as a 
river. This, which is really a river 
of ICE, is called a glacier. 

Glaciers are all the time grinding 
up the rocks over which they pass, 
and pushing down large quantities 
of mud and stones which find their 
way into the rivers, and thence on 
to the lowlands and into the sea ; 
but they are also carrying down great 
masses of rock, earth, and stones 
which have tumbled down on them 
from cliffs as they flowed along. 
Sometimes masses of rock as large 
as a house are thus carried down 
and left in the valleys wherever the 
ice happened to melt, and sometimes 
large valleys have been entirely ru¬ 
ined by having thousands of tons 
of stones and mud left in them. 
Boulders and other masses of rock 
scattered over the surface of the earth 
are supposed to have been left there 
by ancient glaciers, which, at one peri¬ 
od of the earth’s history, flowed down 
many mountains which now have lit¬ 
tle ice on them and only in winter, 





EBONY 


203 


EGG 


The word earth is from the 
Anglo-Saxon eorth , earth. 

EBONY, the wood of several trees 
which grow mostly in the East Indies. 
Black ebony is brought chiefly from 
Ceylon. It is much used in ornamen¬ 
tal furniture, mostly as a veneer, 
or thin layer to be glued on to some 
other wood. It is very hard and 
heavy and takes a fine polish. There 
are other colors of ebony, such as 
red, yellow, green, and a striped 
kind—black and white—but the black 
kind is most used. The ebony is 
only the core or heart of the tree, 
the outer wood being light-colored 
and soft ; it is therefore scarce and 
very costly. The persimrqon tree of 
the southern United States is of the 
same family of trees as those from 
which we get ebony. Most of the 
furniture called ebony is made of 
cherry wood dyed black. 

The word ebony comes from the 
Greek ebenos , which is from the He¬ 
brew eben, stone ; and the wood is 
so called on account of its hardness. 

EEL, a fish with a long snake-like 
body and a soft slimy skin, covered 
with scales so small that they can 
scarcely be seen. Eels live both in 
salt and fresh water, usually on 
muddy bottoms. In the winter they 
make beds about a foot deep in the 
mud, where they lie torpid or numb 
without food until spring. There 
are about fifty kinds of eels in differ¬ 
ent parts of the world, but none 
are found in very cold climates, 
like the Arctic regions. The com¬ 
mon eel of the Northern United 
States is from six inches to two and 
a half feet long, but what is called 
the conger eel is three to five 
feet long. The European conger, 
which is caught on the coasts of 
France and of England, is often ten 
feet long, and some have been 
caught which weighed more than a 
hundred pounds. 

The Sand Eel is found in both 
Europe and America, but only in 
salt water. It is so called because 
it lives in the sand, into which it can 


dart head foremost and bury itself 
very quickly. In Long Island Sound 
and along the coast north of New 
York these eels make the principal 
food of the blue fish and bass, and 
other eels and porpoises also prey 
upon them. Many are caught for 
food, and on the fishing grounds of 
Newfoundland they are used as bait 
for cod. 

The Electrical Eel, found in the 
rivers and ponds of the north parts 
of South America, has the power of 
giving an electrical (see Electric¬ 
ity) shock strong enough to knock 
down a man. The fish uses this to 
defend itself against its enemies and 
to destroy the life of its prey. When 
the Indians, who eat them, wish to 
capture some, they drive wild horses 
into the pool where they are, and 
after the eels have used up their 
electricity on the horses, they take 
them without fear. It is said that 
some of the horses are usually killed 
by the shocks. 

The word eel comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon dl. 

EGG. Eggs are laid by birds, 
REPTILES, AMPHIBIANS, FISHES, 
CRUSTACEANS, and INSECTS. Birds’ 
eggs are oval (from Latin ovum, an 
egg), and are covered with a thin 
shell, white or colored, formed mostly 
of carbonate of lime (CALCIUM car¬ 
bonate). The shell is lined with a 
tough skin, and inside of this is a 
mass of albumen called the white, 
which incloses the yellow or yolk. 
The yolk, which has a thin skin 
around it, has in its middle a little 
jelly-like speck or germ, from which 
the young bird is hatched. The 
yolk is so made that the germ is 
always uppermost, no matter how 
the egg lies, so that when the hen is 
sitting the germ is always nearest to 
the warmth. The yolk and the 
albumen furnish food to the bird 
while it is in the shell. At the 
larger end of the egg, between the 
skin and the shell, is a space filled 
with air for the bird to breathe. 
There is more oxygen in this air 







EGG 


204 


EGG 


than in the outside air. In most 
animals other than birds the outer 
shell and the white are wanting, but 
the yolk and the germ are found in 
the eggs of all animals. Birds 
usually lay their eggs in nests (see 
Birds’ Nests). 


The eggs of almost all the com¬ 
mon birds are told about in the arti¬ 
cles on those birds. In some coun¬ 
tries the common people almost live 
on the eggs of the wild water birds 
which are found on their shores. The 
collecting of these eggs is a very 



Bird and Egg Hunting in the Faroe Islands. 


dangerous business, as the nests are 
usually built high up in the cracks and 
on the ledges of rocks overhanging 
the sea. The eggers, or men who 
gather the eggs, have to climb up 
these rocks and walk along narrow 


ledges, where a single misstep would 
be sure death. In the Faroe Islands, 
where the bird rocks are very high 
and steep, men are let down from 
the tops of the cliffs by strong ropes, 
as shown in the picture. The rope, 




























EGG 


205 


EGG 


on the end of which is a small seat 
for the egger to sit on, is about two 
inches thick. A beam is laid on 
the edge of the cliff to keep the rope 
from being cut by the rough rock. 
The egger, who is let down by four 
or five other men, has tied around 
his waist a cord, by pulling which in 
certain ways he can make signs to 
the men above. The eggers capture 
young birds as well as eggs, either 
by seizing them with their hands or 
by throwing a net over them. The 
man on the left side of the picture is 
catching a bird with one of these 
nets. 

The skill of the eggers is very 
great. They will put their feet 
against the side of the rock and push 
so as to swing themselves out many 
feet, so that they can see the places 
where most of the nests are. In 
some places there are deep holes like 
caves in the rock, in which great 
numbers of birds live. A story is 
told of one of these men who had 
swung himself into one of these 
caves, and finding the floor strewn 
all over with eggs became so excited 
that he lost his rope, which swung 
out beyond his reach. Now and 
then the wind swung it in toward 
the rock, but never near enough for 
him to catch it. He was greatly 
frightened, for he was under the rock 
so that he could not see his friends 
above, and the sea roared so loud 
that they could not hear his cries. 
He knew that if they pulled up the 
rope and did not find him on it they 
would think he had lost his hold and 
fallen into the sea, and he would 
then be left to starve in the cave. 
At last, almost wild with despair, he 
made up his mind to spring and try 
to catch it as it swung in the air. 
It was a dreadful thing to do, for if 
he failed he would fall into the sea 
or on to the rocks, hundreds of feet 
below. He watched until the wind 
swung the rope toward him, fortu¬ 
nately caught it with his hands, and 
was drawn up safely to the top of 
the rock. 


Great numbers of eggs and birds 
are collected every year in the Heb¬ 
rides, and in the Orkney and the 
Shetland Islands. Near the coast 
of one of the Shetland Islands is a 
very high rock called the Pillar of 
Noss. The sea birds used to build 
their nests and hatch their young 
there year after year, but its sides 
were so steep and slippery that no 
man had ever been able to climb it ; 
but at last a man went to its foot in 
a boat and crawled up its sides, 
carrying with him a strong rope, 
one end of which had been fastened 
on the highest part of an island near 
by. He reached the top, after much 
toil and danger, fastened the rope 
there, and hung under the rope a 
stout basket, so made that it would 
slide along on it. By this means he 
was able to get a great many eggs 
and • birds on the rock, and carry 
them across high up in the air above 
the foaming water to the island. 
This rope, which is still used to get 
eggs from the rock, is called by the 
people the Cradle of Noss. 

The Eggs of Reptiles are usually 
pretty large, and have a large yolk 
for the young animal to feed on. 
They are covered with a thick tough 
skin like parchment, not hard like 
the shell of birds’ eggs. They are 
laid in warm sandy places, in dung¬ 
hills, or on heaps of vegetable 
matter, where they are left to be 
hatched by the heat of the sun or the 
warmth from decay. Crocodiles and 
alligators lay 20 to 60 eggs, tortoises 
and turtles 20 to 25, serpents 10 to 
50, and lizards 8 to 12. 

The Eggs of Amphibians, such as 
frogs and toads, look like little lumps 
of jelly, much like the white of a 
hen’s egg, with a black speck in 
each. They are usually found in 
bunches fastened to grass or sticks 
in the water near shore, like the one 
in the picture. The black specks are 
the real eggs, and the jelly keeps 
them together and gives food to the 
young when born. The eggs of tree 
frogs and of toads look much the 




EGG 


206 


EGG 


same, only the first are laid sepa¬ 
rately instead of in bunches, and the 
second are fastened together in 
strings something like a string of 
beads. The tree frog goes into the 



water only in the spring to lay its 
eggs, and when the young are large 
enough they leave the water and 
live in trees. 

The Eggs of Fishes are in little 
sacs called the roe or spawn, which 
sometimes contain thousands and 
even millions. The roe of a single 
cod fish has been known to hold 
9,000,000 eggs. The spawn is laid 


in different places, according to the 
kind of fish : some on beds of sand 
or gravel along the seashore, some 
on the leaves of water plants and on 
seaweed, and some in shallow 
waters at the head of rivers, whither 
many sea fish go every year to lay, 
or spawn, as it is called. Some 



fish, however, such as the shark and 
the ray, lay but few eggs, and take 
more care of them than fishes do 
which lay a great many. Each egg 
is enclosed in an oblong horny case, 
which is attached by long tendrils to 
seaweeds. The shell is thin at one 
end, and the young fish, when 
grown large enough, breaks its way 
out. The empty shells are some¬ 
times found along the seashore, and 
are called “mermaids’ purses,’’ or 
‘ ‘ sea-purses. ’ ’ 



Eggs of Butterflies and Moths. 


The Eggs of Crustaceans are 

usually carried about by the female, 
fastened under the body, until they 
are hatched. More than 12,000 
eggs have been found under a lob¬ 


ster, and it is said that the crawfish 
will lay more than 100,000. They 
are laid in bunches glued together 
with a sticky fluid. These eggs are 
! very small at first, but when ready 












EGG 


207 


EIDER DUCK 


to be hatched they are about the size 
of small shot. It usually takes six 
months to hatch young lobsters. 
When the time comes the mother 
shakes the eggs up by a movement 
of her tail, and this breaks the shells 
and lets the little ones out; and in 
a day or two she gets rid of all her 
burden. The little red things called 
the coral in boiled lobster are the 
eggs. 

The Eggs of Insects are of differ¬ 
ent shapes and colors, but generally 
white, yellow, or green. Those of 
bees, flies, and beetles are usually 
barrel-shaped, and those of butter¬ 
flies and moths are mostly round. 
In the picture the eggs are much en¬ 
larged ; their real size is shown on 
the leaf. They are almost always 
laid near or on the objects on which 
the young will feed when hatched ; 
thus the flesh-fly lays its eggs in 



Eggs of the Mosquito. 


meat, the cheese-fly in cheese, the 
tumble-bug in a ball of dung which 
it rolls away into a safe place, veg¬ 
etable-eating insects on the leaves 
of the plants on which it lives, and 
the mosquito on the surface of quiet 
pools in a boat-shaped mass which 
floats on the water. The flea is said 
to lay only about 12 eggs, and flies 
and beetles about 50 ; but the silk¬ 
worm produces from 500 to 2000, 
the queen bee as many as 50,000, 
and the white ant many millions. 

The Eggs of Mollusks differ much 
in size and shape. Those of the 
oyster are very small, and are stuck 
together with a gluey fluid. They 
are carried between the folds of the 
outer skin called the mantle until 
they are hatched. Some say an 
oyster can carry 100,000 eggs, and 
others say even 2,000,000. Most 
other kinds of shell fish do not carry 


around their eggs with them, but 
leave them to take care of them¬ 
selves. The cephalopod mollusks, 
such as the cuttle fish, lay their eggs 
in bunches and fasten them to sea¬ 
weed. Fishermen call them sea- 
grapes, because they look much like 
a bunch of grapes. 

The word egg comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon ceg. 

EIDER DUCK. This bird, from 
which eider DOWN is got, is nearly 
twice as large as a common duck, 
and has a short neck and rather 
long legs. The plumage of the male 
is very handsome ; the upper part 
of the head is bluish black and 
white, the neck pale green and 
white, the breast buff, the back 
white, and the lower parts black. 
The females are smaller than the 
males, and their plumage is gener¬ 
ally brown barred with black. 

Eider ducks live chiefly in cold 
countries, especially in the most 
northern parts of America, and in 
Norway and Iceland. In Iceland 
and Norway the places where they 
build their nests are valuable prop¬ 
erty and are watched with as much 
care as farms are in other countries. 
In Iceland it is against the law to 
kill a duck in the breeding season. 
The birds seem to know that they 
are safe, and will not stir when peo¬ 
ple go close to them. They build 
their nests wherever they find a 
good place, on the ground, on tops 
of walls, on the roofs of houses, and 
sometimes even in the houses. A 
traveller in Iceland once saw some 
ducks sitting on their eggs in a 
church. The nests, which are round 
and deep, are built of small twigs, 
laced together with moss and sea¬ 
weeds. Each bird lays usually five 
or six eggs, larger than common 
duck eggs, and olive-gray in color. 
Every nest is lined with down, which 
the bird tears from its own breast, 
and in which it buries its eggs. 
This keeps them warm when the 
mother leaves the nest for food. 
The owners of the ground take the 




ELDER 


208 


ELECTRICITY 


down out of the nests, getting about 
a hatful from each. As soon as 
the mother finds that her nest has 
been robbed she again strips the 
beautiful brown down from her 
breast and covers her eggs up, to 
keep them at the right warmth. But 
the down is robbed a second time, 
and as the mother has no more the 
male bird strips the snow-white 
down from his own breast. This too 
is sometimes taken, but not often, 
and the poor bird is generally left to 
hatch her young in peace. 

The eider duck belongs to the or¬ 
der natatores, or swimming BIRDS. 

The word eider is from the Dan¬ 
ish edder or eder, Swedish ejder. 

ELDER, a common shrub, bear¬ 
ing clusters of white flowers fol¬ 
lowed by small black berries, and 
which is often found growing on the 
borders of fields. The young stems 
of the elder are hollow and filled 
with a soft pith which is easily 
pushed out with a stick or stout 
wire. As they are quite straight they 
make fine pop-guns. The pith or 
inside makes the best of pith-balls 
for electrical experiments. The juice 
of the berries, which is a bright 
crimson, is often made into elder¬ 
berry wine. A kind of perfumed 
water, called elder-flower water, is 
made from the flowers ; it is used in 
perfumery and confectionery. 

The word elder is probably from 
the German holder , elder, which is 
from hohly hollow, and der , tree. 

ELECTRICITY. It was found 
out more than two thousand years 
ago that when a piece of amber is 
rubbed with silk it will attract or 
draw toward itself light bodies such 
as bits of dry paper, straw, or 
leaves, but it was not known why it 
does so. About three hundred years 
ago, Dr. Gilbert, an Englishman, 
found out that many other things, 
such as sealing-wax, glass, and sul¬ 
phur, will do this like amber ; and 
he was the first one to use the 
word electricity, which he made from 
elektron, the Greek word for amber, 


as a name for that which makes 
the amber, glass, etc., act in this 
way. But although he gave a name 
to it, he did not know exactly what 
it was, and it was not until a little 
more than a hundred years ago that 
Dr. Franklin found out, by flying a 
KITE, that electricity and lightning 
are the same thing. Since that time 
a great many people have carefully 
studied it, and our knowledge of it 
has grown so wonderfully of late 
years that we have learned how to 
make it very useful. It is by means 
of electricity that we are enabled to 
send messages to distant places by 
TELEGRAPH and to talk with per¬ 
sons hundreds of miles away with 
the TELEPHONE. 

Although we now know that elec¬ 
tricity is the same with lightning, 
we still call it by the name which 
Dr. Gilbert gave it, and give the 
name lightning to the flashes of 
electricity which we often see in the 
air during thunder storms. There is 
electricity in everything. If you 
stroke a cat’s back in cold weather, 
you will hear a snapping sound and 
will feel a tingle in your fingers ; 
and if it be done in the dark you 
will see sparks. This is because 
the rubbing wakes up the electricity 
in the cat’s fur and in your hand ; 
and it shows that there is electricity 
in you as well as in the fur of the 
cat. Some people have much more 
electricity in them than others have ; 
so much, indeed, that they can 
light the gas by touching it with the 
finger after waking up the electricity 
in themselves by rubbing their feet 
on the carpet. A spark leaps from 
their finger to the metal burner, 
and sets the gas on fire. There are 
some animals, like the electrical 
EEL, which have the power of wak¬ 
ing up electricity in themselves. 

Electricity moves over some things 
very freely, and over other things 
with great difficulty, or scarcely at 
all. Thus, if the electricity in a glass 
tube be excited by rubbing it with 
silk, the glass will have the power 






ELECTRICITY 


209 


ELECTRICITY 


of attracting bits of paper and other 
light things only where it has been 
rubbed ; but if a metal rod be held 
by a glass handle and the electricity 
in it be excited in any way, all parts 
of it will attract light bodies. It is 
thus shown that electricity can spread 
itself all over a surface of metal, but 
that it cannot do so over one of glass. 
Glass is therefore said to be a non¬ 
conductor of electricity, and metal 
a conductor. There are some other 
things, such as charcoal, water, wet 
snow, and the bodies of animals, 
which are good conductors, but not 
quite so good as metal ; while, on 
the other hand, there are other 
non-conductors, of which gum lac, 
gutta-percha, amber, resins, sul¬ 
phur, and wax are better than 
glass, and silk, wool, hair, feathers, 
cotton, paper, and dry air are not 
quite so good non-conductors as 
glass. • 

But these things do not all give 
out the same kind of electricity, for 
there are two kinds of it. This can 
be shown by means of 
an electrometer, an in¬ 
strument made up of 
a little pith ball, A, 
hung up by a silk 
thread, B, on a conven¬ 
ient stand, C, as shown 
in the picture, Fig. 1. 
If a glass rod be 
rubbed with silk and 
then brought near the 
pith ball, the ball will 
first be attracted, or 
drawn toward it, and 
then repelled, or driven 
away from it. If a piece 
of sealing-wax be then 
rubbed with a dry flan¬ 
nel and brought near the pith ball, 
it will be found that the ball, which 
was driven away by the glass, will 
be attracted by the sealing-wax. 
Thus we see that there are two 
kinds of electricity, one which is 
got from excited glass and one from 
excited sealing-wax. When the 
excited glass was touched to the 


pith ball, the ball took from it a part 
of its electricity. This electricity 
stayed in the pith ball, because it 
could not pass off by the silk thread, 
which is a non-conductor. Now, 
as the ball, as soon as it was filled 
with electricity, was repelled by the 
glass, we see that bodies filled with 
the same kind of electricity repel 
each other. On the other hand, the 
ball, when filled with the kind of 
electricity that is in the glass, was 
attracted by excited sealing-wax ; 
and so we see that bodies filled with 
different kinds of electricity attract 
each other. If the pith ball had been 
filled with electricity from excited 
sealing-wax, it would have been re¬ 
pelled by the sealing-wax, and at¬ 
tracted by the glass. 

In bodies which have not been ex¬ 
cited by rubbing, or electrified, as it 
is called, the two kinds of electricity 
are mixed together in equal quanti¬ 
ties ; and when we rub them we do 
not make electricity but merely sepa¬ 
rate the two kinds from each other. 
Thus, when we rub glass with silk, 
one kind of electricity stays with the 
glass and the other kind goes to the 
silk. This always happens when 
electricity is excited by rubbing—one 
kind is made in the rubber and the 
other kind in the body rubbed ; and 
one kind cannot be made without 
making the other kind. To mark 
these two kinds of electricity the 
one which is in the stick of glass 
when rubbed with silk is called pos¬ 
itive electricity, and the one in the 
stick of sealing-wax when rubbed 
with flannel is called negative elec¬ 
tricity. In the same way, that in 
the silk with which the glass is rub¬ 
bed is negative electricity, and that 
in the flannel with which the sealing- 
wax is rubbed is positive electricity. 
But the kind of electricity which a 
body gets when rubbed depends on 
the body against which it is rubbed. 
Thus, if amber be rubbed with sul¬ 
phur, it will get positive electricity ; 
but if it be rubbed with glass, it will 
get negative electricity. 



Fig. 1.—Elec¬ 
trometer. 










ELECTRICITY 


210 


ELECTRICITY 


In making experiments with elec¬ 
tricity, we have to find some way to 
keep it when it is made. This can 
only be done by surrounding it with 
things which are non-conductors. 
Dry air is a non-conductor, and ex¬ 
periments can therefore be made bet¬ 
ter in cold weather, because the air 
is then dryer than in warm weather, 
when it is apt to be filled with damp¬ 
ness, and as water is a conductor of 
electricity, the more dampness there 
is in the air, the harder it is to make 
and to keep electricity. When a 
body which has been electrified is so 
surrounded by non-conductors that 
it is cut off from all other things, it 
is said to be insulated (Latin insula , 
an island), and the non-conductors 
by which it is insulated are called in¬ 
sulators. 

We usually get electricity by rub¬ 
bing glass, and there is a machine, 
called an electrical machine, made 
especially for this purpose. This 
machine is made up of three prin¬ 
cipal parts : the body which is 
rubbed, and which is usually either 
a round glass cylinder or barrel or a 
round plate ; the rubber, which is 
generally a leather cushion stuffed 
with hair ; and the prime conduc¬ 
tor, on which the electricity is col¬ 
lected and kept. In the picture, Fig. 


a e 



Fig. 2.—Cylinder Electrical Machine. 

2, is shown a cylinder electrical ma¬ 
chine ; a is the glass cylinder or 
barrel, and b b are the two wheels 
by which it is made to turn round. 
There is a handle on the lower 


wheel to turn it by, and a cord which 
goes round both wheels, so that 
when the lower one is turned the 
upper is turned also. On the other 
side of the barrel is a rubber, held 
up by the glass column f, which 
presses tightly against the barrel. 
The rubber is smeared over with an 
amalgam, made of tin, zinc, and 
mercury melted together, then 
ground to powder and mixed with 
lard. A piece of oiled silk, shown 
at c, is fastened to the rubber and 
lies on the face of the barrel. This 
saves the electricity of the glass from 
being carried away by the air, and 
keeps the dust off the cylinder. At 
d is the prime conductor, which is 
made of hollow brass, and which is 
held up by the glass column e , so 
that it is insulated and can keep 
what electricity it gets. When the 
barrel is turned round it is rubbed 
hard by the rubber, ajid electricity 
is got from it. Now, you will re¬ 
member that there are two kinds of 
electricity in everything, and that 
when we rub two things together we 
do not make electricity but only sep¬ 
arate the two kinds from each other, 
one kind keeping on the thing 
rubbed and the other kind on the 
rubber. So when the glass barrel is 
turned round, positive electricity is 
waked up in the glass, and negative 
electricity on the rubber. To get 
rid of the negative electricity a little 
metal chain is usually fastened to the 
rubber by one end, and the other 
end is let lie on the floor or ground ; 
and as fast as the negative electric¬ 
ity is excited in the rubber it passes 
down this chain to the earth and is 
scattered and lost. The positive 
electricity which is on the glass bar¬ 
rel does not follow the negative elec¬ 
tricity, but passes to the conductor. 
On the end of the conductor next to 
the cylinder are some small metal 
points. These draw the electricity 
from the glass barrel to the conduc¬ 
tor, which is able to keep all it gets 
because it stands on a glass column, 
which is a non-conductor. By turn- 








ELECTRICITY 


211 


ELECTRICITY 


ing the barrel long enough we can 
thus get a great deal of positive elec¬ 
tricity in the conductor. The plate 
electrical machine, the form of which 
can be seen in Fig. 3, works in the 
same way as the barrel machine. 



Fig. 3.—Plate Electrical Machine. 


The electricity is thus imprisoned 
in the conductor, but it will go away 
quickly enough if it gets a chance. 
If you put your finger near the knob 
g at the end of the conductor, you 
will hear a snapping sound, a spark 
will leap from the knob, and you 
will feel a tingling in your finger. 
This is the electricity, which leaps 
from the receiver to your finger and 
passes thence through your body to 
the earth. The reason is this : You 
have both positive and negative elec¬ 
tricity in your finger, while there is 
only positive electricity in the con¬ 
ductor ; the two kinds in your finger 
are separated by the positive electric¬ 
ity of the conductor, which takes 
the negative kind to itself and drives 
away the positive, which is of the 
same kind as itself, to the earth 
through your body. The two differ¬ 
ent kinds of electricity have such a 
liking for each other that they rush 
together quickly, and in doing so 
form a spark. Sparks will continue 
to leap from the round knob of the 
conductor to your finger as long as 


the conductor is kept filled with 
electricity ; but if you hold a sharp 
point, like that of a fine needle, near 
to the knob, there'will be no spark, 
but the electricity will be carried off 
in a stream just as fast as it is made. 
This is because the point draws it 
away so fast that it does not get 
time to gather enough to form a 
spark. This shows the use of light¬ 
ning-rods on houses. These, which 
are always pointed, and which run 
down into the ground, quietly draw 
off the electricity from the thunder 
clouds which come near, just as the 
needle in your hand does, and carry 
it down into the earth. In like man¬ 
ner, if the knob on the conductor 
were sharp-pointed instead of round, 
the electricity would escape into the 
air as fast as it is made. 

The electricity passes through you 
into the earth because your body is 
a good conductor ; but if your body 
be insulated or cut off from the 
earth by some non-conductor, the 
electricity will not pass through you, 
but will collect in you just as it does 
in the conductor of the electrical 
machine. You can insulate your 
body by standing on an insulating 
stool, which is a common wooden 
stool with glass legs. If, while stand- 



Fig. 4.—Electrified Head. 


ing on this stool, you hold in your 
hand a chain which is fastened to 
the knob g of the conductor, most 
of the electricity will pass from the 
conductor into your body, and will 
stay there, because the glass legs 


















ELECTRICITY 


212 


ELECTRICITY 


keep it from passing off to the floor 
and thence into the earth. When 
thus filled with electricity your hair 
will stand up straight. A small 
figure, like a human head covered 
with long hair, makes a very amus¬ 
ing toy, for its hair will rise on end 
when it is put on the conductor and 
electrified. If another person puts 
his finger to your nose, chin, or any 
other part, when you are thus elec¬ 
trified, the electricity will pass to 
him with a spark, and he will feel a 
tingling in his finger, just as you did 
in drawing the electricity from the 
conductor. 

The electricity which collects in 
the conductor can easily be drawn 
off and bottled up in what is called 
a Leyden jar, because the first one 
was made in Leyden, Holland. This 
is a glass jar, like the one shown in 
the picture, Fig. 5, coated inside and 
outside with tin foil, excepting a 
small part at the top. A brass rod 
with a knob at the end goes through 
the cork and down into the jar until 
it touches the inside coating of tin 
foil. If the knob of this jar be held 
about half an inch 
from the conductor, 
sparks will pass for 
some time from the 
conductor to the 
knob of the jar, and 
will then cease. The 
jar is then said to 
be charged, that is, 
the coating on its 
inside is as full of 
electricity as it will 

Fig - S-LeyJen hoW xhe j ar can 

J ' be charged only 

when the outside is connected with 
the earth ; if the outside be insu¬ 
lated, no electricity can be collected 
in it. It is enough to hold the out¬ 
side of the jar in the hand, for then 
it is connected with the earth 
through the body. The positive 
electricity from the conductor then 
passes into the inside coating of the 
jar. It separates the two kinds in 
the outside coating, driving off the 


positive electricity into the earth and 
drawing the negative toward itself; 
but it cannot get the negative elec¬ 
tricity because the glass between the 
outside and inside coatings of the 
tin foil keeps them from coming to¬ 
gether. Thus we have two kinds of 
electricity, one on the outside and 
one on the inside of the jar, both 
anxious to mix together, but kept 
from doing so by the glass between 
them, through which they cannot 
pass. They will leap together at 
the first chance they get, as you will 
see if you put one hand on the out¬ 
side coating and bring the other 
near the brass knob on the top of the 
jar. The charge will then pass 
through your body, and you will feel 
a painful shock, chiefly at the wrists, 
elbows, and across the chest. This, 
which is called an electric shock, is 
really the same as a slight stroke of 
lightning. A great many persons 
can take a shock at the same time 
by taking hold of each others’ hands. 
If one person at one end of the line 
thus made puts one of his hands on 
the outside of the jar, and another 
person at the other end of the line 
then touches the knob on top of the 
jar, the shock will pass through the 
bodies of all at the same 
time. It is usual to dis¬ 
charge a jar with a dis¬ 
charging rod, as shown 
in the picture. Fig. 6. 

This is made of a bent 
wire with a brass ball on 
each end, and with a 
glass handle. When one 
of the balls is touched 
to the outside coating of 
the jar and the other to 
the knob of the jar, the Fi S- 6.—Dis- 
two kinds of electricity 
will rush together with 
a bright spark and a loud snap, and 
the jar will be discharged. By putting 
together a large number of Leyden 
jars and joining their knobs with 
wires so that they can all be dis¬ 
charged at once, we can get together 
an enormous quantity of electricity. 









ELECTRICITY 


213 


ELEMENT 


When jars are thus put together, it 
is called an electrical battery. Such 
a battery must be very carefully 
used, as there is electricity enough in 
one to kill a man as quickly and in 
the same way as if he were struck 
by lightning. 

It has been shown how electricity 
is drawn off in a stream from the 
conductor of the electrical machine 
when a sharp point is held to it. 
This stream, which flows quietly and 
unseen, is called an electric current. 
Electric currents will flow over 
thousands of miles of wire as quickly 
as a flash of lightning, and it is by 
using them that we are able to tele¬ 
graph to the most distant parts of the 
earth. But the currents used in 
telegraphing are not those got from 
an electrical machine, but from a 


—>- 



kind of battery first made by an Ital¬ 
ian named Volta, and therefore 
called the Voltaic battery. Such a 
battery is made up of several glass 
cups, as shown in the picture, each 
of which is partly filled with a mix¬ 
ture of sulphuric acid and water. 
In each cup are also placed a plate 
of zinc, marked Z, and a plate of cop¬ 
per, marked C, in such a way that 
the copper plate of the first cup is 
connected with the zinc plate of the 
second cup by a wire or strip of 
metal soldered to the plates, the cop¬ 
per plate of the second cup to the 
zinc plate of the third cup by a like 
wire or strip, and so on in the same 
order through all the cups. If now 
a wire be fastened to the zinc plate 
in the first cup and another wire to 
the copper plate in the last cup, and 


the ends of the two wires be brought 
together, as in the picture, a current 
of positive electricity will flow round 
and round in the way the arrows 
point. Such a current is called an 
electric circuit. The two wires are 
called the poles of the battery, the 
one marked A being called the posi¬ 
tive pole, and the one marked B the 
negative pole. Electricity thus pro¬ 
duced is called Voltaic electricity. 
It is sometimes also called galvan¬ 
ism, because another Italian, named 
Galvani, first found it out, about 
1790,but Volta made the first battery, 
in 1801. Since that time it has been 
much improved, and the principal 
kind of battery now used to get cur¬ 
rents of electricity is the Grove bat¬ 
tery (first made, in 1839, by Sir Wil¬ 
liam Robert Grove), which differs 
from it in the form of the cups, 
usually called cells, and also in hav¬ 
ing a plate of platinum in place of 
the copper plate, but which works 
in the same way. In the Voltaic bat¬ 
tery the current soon becomes 
weak, but in the Grove battery it al¬ 
ways keeps of the same strength. 
In a large battery of this kind there 
may be fifty or more cells, as is 
needed. An electric current got 
from such a battery is very powerful 
and very useful: by means of it we 
can divide water into its two ELE¬ 
MENTS, HYDROGEN and OXYGEN ; 
we can make iron and steel into 
MAGNETS ; and we can send mes¬ 
sages to any part of the earth (see 
Telegraph). Another important 
use of it is told about in the article 
Metal Work, under Electro-plate. 
Electricity has been used to move 
small machines, and some think that 
it will be used in time instead of 
steam for moving large engines. It is 
also the source of the electric light, 
which is coming into use for lighting 
houses and the streets of cities. 

ELEMENT, a simple substance 
which cannot be divided into other 
substances. Water looks to the eye 
like a simple substance, but the 
chemist has found out that it can be 


























ELEMENT 


214 


ELEMENT 


separated into two things, oxygen 
and HYDROGEN. No way has yet 
been found out to divide oxygen or 
hydrogen, and they are therefore 
called simple substances or elements. 
By thus dividing things into their 
elements, which we call analyzing 
them, chemists have found out that 
the many thousand different things 
in the world may all be separated 
into about seventy elements. As 
chemists are all the time finding out 
something new about things, it is 
possible that the number of the ele¬ 
ments may be added to ; and some 
scientific men believe that there are 
not so many elements, but that when 
we know more about things many 
of those now called elements will be 
divided and found to be only differ¬ 
ent forms of other elements. Some 
even think that there is only one kind 
of matter in the world, and that all 
the elements are but different forms 
of that one thing. Professor Lock- 
yer, an English astronomer, is said 
to have shown by means of the in¬ 
strument called the spectroscope 
that many of the elements are not 
simple things, but it is hard to prove 
it, and until it is proved we shall 
have to think that there are as many 
as seventy elements. 

Of the elements now known nearly 
sixty are metals, and the rest make 
up all the other known simple sub¬ 
stances. In the following table are 
given the names of all the elements 
now known (1879), those marked 
thus (?) being still doubtful; the non- 
metallic elements, or those which 
are not metals, are marked with a 
star (*), and the metallic elements, 
or those which are metals, are 
printed without a star : 


Aluminum, 

Antimony, 

Arsenic, 

Barium, 

Bismuth, 

♦Boron, 

♦Bromine, 

Cadmium, 

Caesium, 

Calcium, 

♦Carbon, 


Cerium, 
♦Chlorine, 
Chromium, 
Cobalt, 
Columbium, 
Copper, 
Decipium ? 
Didymium, 
Erbium, 
♦Fluorine, 
Gallium, 


Glucinum, 

Gold, 

♦Hydrogen, 

Indium, 

♦Iodine, 

Iridium, 

Iron, 

Lanthanum, 
Lavoesium ? 
Lead, 
Lithium, 


Magnesium, 
Manganese, 
Mercury, 
Molybdenum, 
Mosandrum ? 
Nickel, 
♦Nitrogen, 
Osmium, 
♦Oxygen, 
Palladium, 
Philippium ? 
♦Phosphorus, 


Platinum, 

Potassium, 

Rhodium, 

Rubidium, 

Ruthenium, 

Selenium, 

♦Silicon, 

Silver, 

Sodium, 

Strontium, 

♦Sulphur, 

Tantalum, 

Tellurium, 


Terbium, 

Thallium, 

Thorium, 

Tin, . 

Titanium, 

Tungsten, 

Uranium, 

Vanadium, 

Ytterbium ? 

Yttrium, 

Zinc, 

Zirconium. 


Some of these elements are solids 
at the common heat and pressure of 
the air, some are liquids, and some 
are gases ; but by changing the pres¬ 
sure and the heat any one of them 
may be made to take another form. 
To understand this, it is necessary 
to know what a solid, a liquid, and 
a gas are. The earth on which we 
stand is a solid, the water which 
runs on the earth is a liquid, and the 
air which surrounds the earth is a 
gas. A solid body is one which 
does not change its shape or size 
from its own weight: thus a piece 
of iron, stone, or wood will keep its 
shape if left alone, because the par¬ 
ticles of which it is made up stick 
together closely. In a liquid body 
the particles stick together only 
slightly, so that its own weight will 
make it change its shape : thus, if 
you drop water on the floor it will 
not stay together like a solid, but its 
own weight will cause it to spread 
out in all directions. A gas is a 
body whose particles do not stick 
together at all, but repel or push each 
other away : when a little gas is put 
into an empty vessel it will spread 
itself until it fills the whole vessel. 
Thus a gas will not settle down in a 
bottle or jar so as to have a level sur¬ 
face like a liquid, but always shows 
a strong desire to fill any vacant 
space, and will spread itself out very 
thin in order to do so. A gas too 
may be squeezed into less space, but 
a liquid cannot : a gas which fills 
a quart bottle may be pressed into 
a pint bottle, and even a smaller one 
if force enough be used, but a liquid 
cannot be forced into a vessel smaller 
than its size. 






ELEMENT 


215 


ELEPHANT 


Of the elements given in the table, 
oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and 
chlorine are gases at the common 
heat and pressure of the air, mercury 
is a liquid, and the others are solids. 
But if the gases be put under great 
pressure and a great deal of heat be 
taken from them at the same time, 
they can be forced to take the form 
first of liquids and then of solids. 
Mercury too can be made into a solid 
by taking its heat from it, so that it 
may be hammered out like lead ; and 
if heat be added to liquid mercury, it 
will become a gas. It is the same 
with the solid elements : they may 
easily be made into liquids and gases 
by adding to their heat. 

The elements are found both as 
elements—that is, in the free state, 
or not united with each other—and 
as compounds, in which two or more 
are united together. For instance, 
the oxygen in air is in the free state, 
being only mixed up with the nitro¬ 
gen and not united with it ; but the 
oxygen in water is united or com¬ 
bined with hydrogen in such a way 
as to make a substance entirely 
different from either of them. A 
substance thus formed by the union 
of two or more elements is called a 
compound substance. Coal gas is a 
compound substance, because it is 
made up of hydrogen gas and car¬ 
bon ; and common salt is also a 
compound substance, because it 
is made up of chlorine gas and the 
metal sodium. By continual trying 
chemists have found out that every¬ 
thing on the earth, above the earth, 
and below the surface of the earth, 
including everything that grows, 
whether plants or animals, is made 
up of some of the elements, united 
in different ways. Some of the 
principal compounds of elements are 
told about in the articles Acid, 
Base, and Alkali. 

There are in the world three great 
classes or divisions of things, usually 
called kingdoms : the mineral, the 
animal, and the vegetable kingdoms. 
All the simple substances or ele¬ 


ments belong to the mineral king¬ 
dom, and also all compound sub¬ 
stances which do not grow. Thus 
water and air are included in the 
mineral kingdom. Of things which 
grow, all animals are included in 
the animal kingdom, and all PLANTS 
in the vegetable kingdom. 

The word element is from the Lat¬ 
in elementum , a simple substance. 

ELEPHANT, the largest and heav¬ 
iest of land animals. The elephant 
is usually about eight feet high at 
the shoulder, but is sometimes twice 
as high as a man. It becomes full 
grown when about thirty years old, 
and lives 120 to 150 years. The 
weight of a large elephant is about 
10,000 pounds, which is equal to the 
weight of five common cart-loads of 
coal. It is a very clumsy and heavy 
animal to look at, but can run very 
fast, and go up and down quite 
steep hills. Its gait when going 
fast is neither a trot nor a gallop, 
but a kind of shuffle. It can also 
swim very easily and for a long time. 
In crossing rivers very young ele¬ 
phants often scramble on to their 
mothers’ shoulders, and hold on with 
their legs. 

The elephant’s head is very large, 
but its neck is so short that it could 
not reach its food or drink without 
its trunk. The trunk or proboscis 
(Greek pro , before, and bo skein, to 
feed or graze) is really a long nose, 
but, though it can be used for smell¬ 
ing, its chief use is to feel of and to 
pick up things. It is four or five feet 
long, and is mostly made up of 
MUSCLES so that it may.be length- 
ened, shortened, or bent in any way. 
It has two tubes through it which 
connect with the nostrils, but which 
may be cut off from them when the 
animal wishes. On the end is a 
small finger-like feeler, with which it 
can pick up objects as small as a 
pin. The elephant gathers its food 
with the trunk, and puts it into its 
mouth with it. By sucking the air 
out the tubes can be drawn full of 
water, which is then poured into the 




ELEPHANT 


216 


ELEPHANT 


mouth and drunk ; or the trunk can 
be turned upward and the water 
blown over the back for a bath. It 
is also through the trunk that the 



Head of Asian Elephant. 


elephant sends out its trumpet-like 
voice. The trunk is thus at once a 
nose, a hand, a trumpet, and a suc¬ 
tion and a forcing pump. It is also 
a very strong weapon of defence. 

The tusks of the elephant are 
really two long teeth, and grow out 
of the upper jaw, one on each side. 
They are sometimes nine feet long, 
and weigh more than a heavy man. 
Both the male and female elephant 
have tusks, but those of the males 
are much the larger. The tusks are 
used to root up the ground, to tear 
climbing plants from trees, and by 
tame elephants to move stones, tim¬ 
ber, and other heavy things. The 
tusks are made of ivory covered 
with a very hard enamel. 

The food of the elephant is wholly 
vegetable, being chiefly grass, the 
leaves of trees, and roots. Ele¬ 


phants do much damage to the for¬ 
ests in which they live, by breaking 
down young trees and branches to 
get the leaves. They usually go in 
herds, feeding at morning and even¬ 
ing, and keeping in the shade dur¬ 
ing the midday heat. Their eyes 
are small, but their senses of smell 
and of hearing are very sharp, and 
they are easily alarmed at the sight of 
man. On the coming of danger they 
go into the deep woods, but if at¬ 
tacked they turn and defend them¬ 
selves with great fury. The ele¬ 
phant often fights with the tiger and 
the rhinoceros, and, though gener¬ 
ally the victor, is sometimes killed by 
the rhinoceros’s horn. 

There are two kinds of elephants, 
one of which belongs in Asia and 
the other in Africa. The Asiatic 
elephant is smaller than the African. 
All the tame elephants which we see 
are of the Asiatic kind ; they are 



Head of African Elephant. 


brought mostly from India, where 
they are largely used in travelling 
and in hunting tigers. They are 
usually of a brownish gray color, but 









ELEPHANT 


217 


ELM 


yellowish white ones, or albinos, 
are sometimes seen. In Siam the 
white elephant is a sacred animal, 
and is treated with the greatest re¬ 
spect. The African elephant is 
known by its enormous ears, which 
are three times as large as those of 
the other kind. It is wilder and 
fiercer than the Asiatic elephant, and 
is not now tamed, but in ancient 
times was used by the Carthaginians 
in their wars against the Romans. 
It is hunted chiefly for its tusks, 
which furnish most of the ivory of 
commerce, and many thousands are 
killed yearly in Africa. 

The Arabs, who are the principal 
elephant - hunters, usually go after 
them on horseback, but often on 
foot. Those who hunt on foot fol¬ 
low the tracks of an elephant so as 
to come up with it near noonday, 
when the animal is usually asleep or 
lying down to rest. If one is found 
asleep, a hunter creeps up to it 
through the grass and cuts off its 
trunk with his sword. When the 
elephant feels the blow it jumps up 
on its feet, but it is so confused that 
the hunter gets away, and the ele¬ 
phant bleeds to death in about an 
hour. If the animal is awake, the 
hunters creep up behind and cut the 
sinews of one of the hind legs above 
the heel. The elephant cannot then 
step upon this leg, and so cannot 
run after them. They soon cut the 
cord of the other hind leg, when 
the animal falls down, and they then 
cut an. artery and let it bleed to 
death. 

When the Arabs hunt on horse¬ 
back they chase the animals until 
they get angry and turn upon them. 
One of the hunters then lets an ele¬ 
phant almost catch up with him, 
keeping his horse running just fast 
enough to escape the animal’s 
trunk, with which it tries to seize 
the horse. The elephant’s mind is 
so taken up with chasing this one 
that it does not notice the others, 
who ride up behind. As soon as 
one of them gets near enough he 


jumps off his horse, and seizing his 
sword with both hands cuts the 
cord of the elephant’s hind leg. 
He then jumps on his horse again. 
The elephant is made almost help¬ 
less by the cut, but tries to make an¬ 
other rush on three legs, when the 
hunters cut his other leg and he falls 
down and dies from loss of blood. 
This kind of hunting is very danger¬ 
ous, and the hunters are often 
caught and killed by the elephants. 

Sir Samuel Baker says that the 
Arabs are very fond of elephants’ 
flesh, which is generally fat and 
juicy, but is coarse and has a strong 
smell. The trunk and the feet are the 
best parts for eating, and he found 
them very good when well cooked. 
To cook one of the great feet, a hole 
nearly a yard wide is dug in the 
ground, and filled full of wood, 
which is kept burning until the sides 
of the hole are very hot. When 
the blaze has gone out the foot is 
laid upon the coals, and the hole is 
then covered over with green wood 
and wet grass, plastered with mud, 

* and stamped down tight. Earth is 
then piled over it, so that all the 
heat will be kept in, and it is left for 
a little more than a day and night. 
When opened the foot is found so 
well baked that the whole sole 
comes off like a shoe, leaving enough 
tender, juicy meat inside to feed fifty 
men. 

The elephant is a MAMMAL of 
the order fiachydermata , or thick- 
skinned animals. 

The word elephant is from the 
Latin and Greek elefthas. 

ELM, a tree common in the United 
States, and in most cool countries. 
The white or American elm, found 
in all the Northern and Middle 
States, and as far south as Georgia, 
is one of the most beautiful trees in 
the world. It grows very high, with 
many wide-spreading branches, and 
its trunk is usually clothed with 
small leaf-covered twigs. It is one 
of the finest of shade trees. Its 
branches often lock together so as 








EMERALD 


218 


ENAMEL 


to make beautiful arches overhead, 
like those in Gothic churches. Cat¬ 
tle yokes, blocks for the rigging of 
ships, and hubs for wheels are made 
from its timber. 

The slippery elm, sometimes called 
the red elm on account of the color 
of its buds, is a smaller tree than 
the white elm, but has more beauti¬ 
ful leaves. Its inner bark is full of 
a kind of mucilage ; it is dried and 
much used in medicine in cases of 
catarrh, dysentery, etc. The wahoo 
or winged elm is found in the South¬ 
ern States. Its wood is valuable. 
The English elm, a beautiful shade 
tree, and the wych elm, sometimes 
called the Scotch elm, have been 
planted in this country, and grow 
well. Elm bark is used in tanning, 
dyeing, and in sugar refining. 

The word elm is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ellm t Latin ulmus , elm. 

EMERALD, a beautiful green 
PRECIOUS STONE. The true emerald 
is of a rich green color ; when pale 
bluish green it is usually called aqua¬ 
marine. The oriental emerald is a 
green sapphire. It is among the 
rarest of all stones, and very few of 
them have been found. The finest 
emeralds are found in the valley of 
Mozo, in the United States of Colom¬ 
bia, South America, and the finest 
aquamarines are brought from Sibe¬ 
ria, Hindostan, and Brazil. 

An emerald of fine color and with¬ 
out any flaws sells for a high price ; 
but the aquamarine is not so val¬ 
uable. Very large ones are often 
found, some of them a foot long, but 
their color is usually poor. 

The word emerald comes from the 
Norman French esmeraulde , which 
is from the Latin smaragdus , Greek 
smaragdos , from smarassein , to 
shine. 

EMERY, a hard mineral much 
used for polishing hard stones, met¬ 
als, and plate glass. It is found in 
pieces of all sizes, up to several tons 
weight. The stone is crushed un¬ 
der stamps, and sifted into powder 
of different fineness. Emery paper, 


emery cloth, and emery sticks, used 
for polishing different things, are 
made by covering paper, cotton 
cloth, and slips of wood with glue 
and then sifting emery powder on 
them. Razor-strop paper is made 
by mixing emery powder and ground 
glass with paper pulp, and then 
rolling it into sheets. Most of the 
emery used is dug in the island of 
Naxos in the Grecian Archipelago, 
and shipped from Smyrna. Much has 
been found in Massachusetts, North 
Carolina, Georgia, and Montana. 

The word emery is in French 
tmeri , and is from the Greek smuris, 
emery. 

ENAMEL, a glassy substance used 
for painting on glass and porcelain, 
and for covering metals. There are 
two kinds, thin and thick enamel. 

Thin Enamel, sometimes called 
surface enamel, is generally put on 
like a paint, with a camel’s hair 
pencil, and the article is then heated 
hot enough to melt the enamel, 
which is thus fastened on so as to 
become a part of the surface. The 
pictures on pottery and porcelain are 
made in this way. The most diffi¬ 
cult part of the work is the baking, 
which has to be watched with the 
greatest care, because if the oven 
gets too hot the colors will run to¬ 
gether and spoil the picture. 

Enameling on metal is still harder 
than enameling on porcelain or on 
glass, because the metal sometimes 
spoils the colors. For this reason 
gold is better to enamel on than 
silver or copper. Beautiful pictures 
are sometimes enamelled on metals, 
and fine jewelry is made by covering 
gold with different colored enamels 
put on in ornamental patterns. But 
the largest use of enamel is to cover 
the inside of metal wares, such as 
saucepans and basins, to keep them 
from rusting. The surface is first 
cleaned with weak acid, and wetted 
with gum-water ; the enamel, made 
of powdered glass, borax, and 
SODA, is then sifted on as a powder. 
When heated in an oven this melts 





ENAMEL 


219 


ENGRAVING 


and covers the surface of the metal 
with a thin white glaze. Watch 
dials are made in a like way. The 
round disks are cut out of thin sheet 
copper, and after being shaped right 
are covered with a white enamel. 
This is carefully baked, and when 
finished the hour figures and other 
marks are painted on with black 
enamel, which also is baked until it 
becomes a part of the whole. 

Thick Enamel, sometimes called 
enclosed enamel, is more like a paste 
than a paint, and is spread thick so 
as to fill up enclosed places. 
Among the principal thick enamels 
is that called cloisonnt , from the 
French word cloison , a partition. 
In this all the lines of the design are 
built up with thin metal partitions, 
made of a kind of square wire, so 
that the whole picture appears 
raised above the surface. The 
spaces between the partitions are 
then filled with enamel, which is col¬ 
ored glass ground to powder, and 
mixed with enough gum and water 
to make a paste of it. When all the 
parts are filled with the right colors 
to make the design, the piece is 
baked in a furnace. As soon as the 
enamel melts enough to become 
glassy, the piece is taken out and 
left to cool. As the enamel when 
melted takes up much less room than 
when powdered, the parts have to be 
filled up again and again until the 
melted enamel is even with the tops 
of the metal partitions. The surface 
is then ground down smooth, when 
all the parts of the picture are seen 
divided by the metal cloisons or par¬ 
titions. Cloisonne ware was prob¬ 
ably first made in the East. The 
Chinese and the Japanese make very 
beautiful cloisonne vases, plates, and 
other dishes. 

Another way is to cut out places 
for the enamel in the metal, instead 
of building up partitions above the 
surface. This is called by the 
French champ-lev 6 . 

The word enamel is made of en, 
in, and the French esmazl, enamel. 


ENGRAVING. There are two 
principal kinds of engravings, wood 
or block engravings, usually called 
wood-cuts, and plate engravings. 
Wood engravings are printed with 
wooden blocks, and plate engravings 
with metal plates. 

Wood Engraving. Blocks for 
wood engravings are usually of 
boxwood, and are made just the 
height of a type, because they are 
used mostly with type in printing 
the pages of books. The surface of 
the block, which is made very 
smooth, is first covered over with a 
thin layer of white chalk mixed with 
gum-water. The artist draws his 
picture on this, partly with a lead 
pencil and partly with a brush and 



Wood Engravers’ Tools. 


India ink. The block now goes to 
the engraver, who cuts out of the 
wood, with fine sharp tools, all the 
spaces between the lines of the draw¬ 
ing, leaving the lines themselves just 
as the artist drew them. The draw¬ 
ing is thus left in relief, that is, 
standing up like the face of a type, 
so that when the block is used in 
printing the raised lines make a pic¬ 
ture just like the drawing. Several 
kinds of tools are used, some with 
sharp points, some with square, and 
some with round edges, as shown in 
the picture. At the bottom is one 
of the tools with the handle on. 

Plate Engraving. The picture 
from an engraved plate is just the 


















ENGRAVING 


220 


ENGRAVING 


opposite of this. The lines them¬ 
selves are cut or sunk into the plate, 
leaving the spaces between them as 
they were. When the plate is used 
to print with, it is inked all over, 
and the ink is then rubbed off from 
the surface with a cloth. This 
leaves all the lines full of ink ; and 
it is these sunken lines which print 
the picture when a sheet of paper is 
pressed down on to the plate. Print¬ 
ing engravings from plates takes 
much more time than printing from 
wood blocks. They have to be done 
by themselves, and therefore cannot 
be printed on the same press with 
the letter press or type part of a 
book. 

The metals most used for making 
plates for printing engravings are 
copper and steel. Copper is much 
softer and more easily cut, but steel 
lasts longer, and is therefore much 
more used for fine pictures. 

Maps are now almost the 
only kind of engravings made 
from copper plates, but a kind 
of outline pictures called 
etchings are also usually 
printed from copper plates, 
although steel and glass 
plates are sometimes used. 

Copper was used for making 
all plates until this century, 
when an American named 
Jacob Perkins found out how to sof¬ 
ten steel by taking the carbon out of 
it, so that it is almost as easy to cut 
with the engraver’s tools as copper, 
and then to harden it again after the 
picture has been cut on it. 

The art of cutting the lines on a 
plate from which an engraving is to 
be printed is called engraving. The 
process is nearly the same on both 
copper and steel plates. There are 
several kinds of engraving, the prin¬ 
cipal of which are line, stipple, and 
etching. In line engraving the lines 
of the picture are cut into the plate 
with a tool called the burin or graver. 
The burin has a sharp triangular or 
three-cornered point, as shown in 
the picture (4), which cuts a clean 


line out of the plate without leaving 
any rough edge. Several kinds of 
burins with points of different width 
are used. Very fine lines are made 
with another tool called the dry 
point. This is round and sharp like 
a darning needle, and leaves a burr 
or rough edge along each side of the 
line it cuts, which has to be scraped 
off with a tool called a scraper (1). 
The scraper is three-cornered, as 
can be seen by the end view (2). 
Another tool called a burnisher (3) 
is used to soften lines cut too deep 
and to rub out scratches in the plate. 
In stipple engraving the picture is 
shaded by means of little dots, cut 
close together in the plate, instead 
of lines. The larger dots are made 
with the burin, the smaller and finer 
ones with the dry point. Stipple 
engraving is much used in making 
portraits and pictures of sculpture. 


Etching is a kind of engraving done 
partly with tools and partly by 
means of an ACID. A copper plate 
is varnished over with a thin film or 
coat of wax and ASPHALTUM. 
When it is dry the etcher makes his 
drawing on it with etching needles 
or points, which are simply needles 
of different sizes set into handles, 
cutting all the lines through the wax 
varnish down to the copper. After 
this is finished a little rim of wax is 
built up all around the edge of the 
plate, and weak nitric acid mixed 
with water is poured all over the 
face of the drawing. The acid eats 
into the copper wherever it is laid 
bare by the lines of the drawing, but 
does not eat the parts covered by 



1, Scraper; 2, End View of Scraper; 3, Bur¬ 
nisher; 4, Burin. 














ENVELOPE 


221 


ERMINE 


the varnish. In about a quarter of 
an hour the acid is poured off and 
the plate cleaned, the varnish being 
melted off. The plate is then ready 
to be printed from like any other 
plate engraving. When etching is 
done on glass, another kind of acid, 
called hydrofluoric acid, is used, be¬ 
cause nitric acid will not eat glass. 

Almost all engravings are made 
up partly of line and stipple work, 
and partly of etching. The outlines 
of figures, and draperies, land¬ 
scapes, and skies, buildings, and 
animals are usually etched ; but they 
are afterwards finished with tools ; 
human figures are generally engraved 
in lines with the burin, but in cheap 
engravings they are sometimes done 
in stipple. Straight lines parallel or 
running side by side are made by a 
machine called the ruling machine, 
which cuts them very true, and either 
fine or coarse, as wanted. 

Mezzotint, or middle tint (from 
Italian mezzo , middle, and tinto , 
color), looks much like a drawing in 
India ink. This is the opposite of 
other kinds of plate engraving. In 
common plate engraving the lines 
which are to print the picture are cut 
into the plate, the part of the plate 
which is left untouched making the 
light portions of the picture ; but in 
mezzotint the plate itself makes the 
dark parts or shadows, and the light 
parts are cut out. The face of the 
plate is first made rough by running 
over it a little instrument with teeth, 
called a cradle. The picture is then 
made by rubbing away parts of this 
rough surface with scrapers and 
burnishers so as to make the lights 
and shades. Aquatint engraving is 
another form once much used, but 
which has now given place to lith¬ 
ography and other methods. (See 
Bank Note and Lithograph.) 

The word engraving is from en¬ 
grave, which is from en, in or upon, 
and grave, Anglo-Saxon grafan , to 
grave, to carve. 

ENVELOPE, a cover or wrapper, 
usually of a letter. When envelopes 


first came into use they were made 
by hand, but now they are made by 
machines. The sheets of paper are 
first cut, in piles at a time, by great 
knives, into pieces a little longer than 
they are wide. These oblong pieces 
are next cut by dies of the proper 
shape in the right form to be folded 
into an envelope. By opening an 
envelope and laying it out flat you 
will see what this form is. Some¬ 
times these blanks, as they are 
called, are cut directly from the 
sheets of paper. If there is to be a 
stamp or device on the flap of the 
envelope, it is then put on with an¬ 
other DIE. 

The blanks are now fed one by 
one into the folding machine. Each 
one is carried on to a kind of box of 
the exact size of the envelope to be 
made ; a plunger, or flat piece of 
metal made to fit into the box, now 
comes down and pushes the blank 
in, making four creases where the 
four flaps fold over. The two end 
flaps are then folded down by small 
pieces of iron, which work like fin¬ 
gers ; a gumming machine gums the 
edges ; two more iron fingers fold 
down the other flaps, but fasten only 
one of them ; and lastly a pusher 
pushes out the envelope and makes 
room for another one. All these 
things are done in one second, so 
that each machine makes sixty en¬ 
velopes a minute. 

The word envelope is from the 
French enveloppe, which is from eii , 
in, and voluper, to wrap. 

ERMINE, a kind of weasel found 
in the north of Europe and of Asia. 
It lives on animal food, such as rats, 
mice, moles, and other small ani¬ 
mals, and birds and their eggs. In 
summer its fur is yellowish brown, 
but in winter it is mostly pure 
white. The tip of the tail is always 
black. Ermine fur is brought mostly 
from Siberia, Alaska, Norway, and 
Lapland. In making it up the black 
tail-tips are set into the white fur so 
as to make a regular pattern. It is 
used for ladies’ winter garments, and 




EYE 


222 


EYE 


in some countries for the robes of 
kings, judges, and other high offi¬ 
cers. 

The word ermine comes from 
Armenia, in which country the ani¬ 
mal is found. It was called the Ar¬ 
menian rat in old times. 

EYE. In the article Man, it is 
told that there are two rounded hol¬ 
lows called orbits in the front part 
of the skull, to hold what are com¬ 
monly called the eyeballs. They are 
rightly called eyeballs, for when 
taken out they are seen to be nearly 
as round as a ball. One of them is 
shown in the picture, where it is cut 
down through the middle so that its 
parts can be seen. In this S S is a 
tough skin which goes all round the 
eye, excepting in front, where there 


5 



Plan of the Eyeball. 


is a round opening in it covered by 
a very thin clear skin like a watch- 
glass, called the cornea, marked C C. 
Inside the cornea is a space, A, 
filled with a clear liquid called the 
aqueous or watery humor. 

When you look into an eye, you 
see in the middle of the white ball a 
round colored part with a darker 
round spot in the middle of it. This 
round part is the iris, and the dark 
spot in it is the pupil. The pupil is 
not really a spot, but a hole through 
the iris, and it looks dark because 
the back part of the eyeball is black. 
It is like a window looking into a 
dark room. The iris is of different 
colors in different people. If a per¬ 
son has a blue iris we commonly say 
that he has a blue eye, and if a very 


dark iris, a black eye. But the eye 
itself is always of the same color ; it 
is only the iris which differs. In the 
picture the two little partitions 
pointing towards A are the upper 
and lower sides of the iris, and the 
space between them is the pupil or 
window opening into the eye. 

A little way back of the iris is a 
clear jelly-like substance, L, called 
the crystalline lens. It is shaped 
like a double convex lens, but the 
curve of the front side is flatter than 
the one behind. Behind this lens 
the whole inside of the eye, V V, is 
filled with another clear fluid, called 
the vitreous or glassy humor, which 
is a little thicker than the aqueous 
humor in front of the lens. Inside 
the tough skin, S S, around the eye¬ 
ball, is a second coat called the 
choroid, the inside of which is cov¬ 
ered with a very black slime, and 
over this is a delicate thin skin called 
the retina. The part marked O is 
the optic NERVE, which enters the 
eye on the side next to the nose, 
and which joins the eye with the 
brain. 

The eye is much like the camera, 
or instrument used by a photog¬ 
rapher for taking pictures. When 
a person sits down before the cam¬ 
era a small image of him is made on 
a plate in the back part of the in¬ 
strument by means of the lenses in 
it, through which the rays of light 
pass. If there were no lenses no 
image would be formed, but the 
whole of the plate would be black¬ 
ened. It is the same with the eye. 
When we look at anything, the rays 
of light from the thing looked at 
pass through the cornea, and part 
of them go through the pupil, and 
through the crystalline lens and the 
vitreous humor to the back part of 
the eye, where they fall on the re¬ 
tina. Thus the aqueous humor, the 
crystalline lens, and the vitreous hu¬ 
mor act like lenses and make an 
image of the thing looked at upon 
the retina, just as the lenses in the 
camera form an image on the plate. 






EYE 


223 


EYE 


This image, like the one in the cam¬ 
era, is much smaller than the thing 
looked at. 

If this were all there is to the eye, 
it would not be of much use to us, 
for however well it might work we 
could not see the image made. See¬ 
ing is not done by the eye, but by 
the brain. As told above, the eye 
is joined to the brain by the optic 
nerve. The eye makes the image 
and the nerve carries the sense of it 
to the brain, and then it is seen. 
The image itself is not carried to the 
brain ; the nerve only makes the 
brain know that the image is 
formed on the retina. As there are 
two eyes, so there are two nerves, 
one from each eye, but as each eye 
makes the same image, so each 
nerve tells the same story to the 
brain. If it did not, the mind would 
see double. We are enabled to move 
our eyes by means of MUSCLES, 
which are joined to the brain by mo¬ 
tor NERVES. 

The eyes of all persons do not see 
alike ; some are near-sighted and 
some are far-sighted. In a near¬ 
sighted eye the lenses are too round, 
so that the rays of light come to¬ 
gether into a point before they reach 
the retina. Thus, the image being 
in front of instead of on the retina, 
is not plainly seen. In the eyes of 
persons who are far-sighted the 
lenses are too flat, so that the rays 
of light would come to a point be¬ 
hind the retina, but as the retina 
stops them they make a blurred 
image on it. Near-sighted people 
hold things near the eye to see them, 
because the image is then formed 
further back on the retina ; and far¬ 
sighted people hold things far off to 
see them, because the image is then 
formed further forward on the ret¬ 
ina. For the same reasons near¬ 
sighted persons wear concave 
glasses, and far-sighted persons 
convex glasses. Near-sightedness 
is sometimes natural, but it is often 
caused in children by bending over 
and bringing the eyes too close to 


the thing looked at. Old people are 
generally too far-sighted, because 
the humors of the eye dry up by age, 
so that the lenses become flattened. 
For the same reason, the eyes of 
near-sighted persons become better 
as they grow older. Birds of prey 
can flatten their eyes by means of a 
muscle which draws back the crys¬ 
talline lens, so that they can see at 
great distances ; and they have also 
a kind of bony rim to their eyes by 
which they can press out the cornea 
and make it rounder, so that they 
can see near things clearly. 

The iris of the eye is a kind of 
curtain, which stretches and shrinks, 
so that the pupil, or opening 
through it, is sometimes smaller and 
sometimes larger. In a bright light 
the iris stretches so as to make the 
pupil smaller, because too much 
light pains the nerves ; but in the 
dark it shrinks and enlarges the pu¬ 
pil, so as to let in more rays of light. 
The pupil is shaped differently in 
different animals. In the cat it looks 
like the edge of a convex LENS. 
When the sun is bright it is very 
narrow, but in the evening it opens 
wide. The eyes of owls work in the 
same way, and this is the reason 
why they can see so well in the dark. 
If our pupils opened as wide as 
theirs at night, we could see as well 
as they do. Children often strain 
their eyes by trying to read with too 
little light. This is a very bad habit, 
and if done much is sure to injure 
the eyes. It is also dangerous to 
have too much light. Children have 
been struck blind by staring at the 
sun. 

Each eye is furnished with two 
eyelids, movod by muscles, which 
shield it from too much light, and 
keep it from being injured. The 
eyelashes also help to shade the eyes 
and to keep out dust. The motion 
of the eyelid commonly called wink¬ 
ing keeps a gentle flow of tears all 
the time over the eyeball, keeping it 
moist and carrying off any dust or 
other matter which may get into the 




EYE 


224 


EYE 


eye. The tears, which come from 
little bags above the upper eyelid, 
finally pass into two tubes in the 
inner corner of the eye, which lead 
into the nose. When we cry, more 
tears flow than can pass through the 
drain into the nose, and so they run 
over the eyelids and down the 
cheeks. Tears are therefore useful 
to the eyes, but too much weeping 
irritates and injures them. 

The eyes are among the most deli¬ 
cate of our organs, and too much 
care cannot be taken of them. 
Though they'are put in what seems 
to be a dangerous place, they are so 
guarded that they seldom get hurt. 
The parts around them are some¬ 
times bruised, and we then say that 
the eye is black and blue, but the 
eyes themselves are seldom struck. 
This is because they are set in a 
deep socket, so that they are pro¬ 
tected by bone all around them ex¬ 
cept in front. A blow upon one of 
them strikes on these bony walls, so 
that the eye generally escapes in¬ 
jury. The eye has still another 
guard in being able to wink quickly. 
When anything harmful is seen 
coming toward it, the optic nerve 
tells the brain of the danger, the 
brain sends a message through some 
of the motor nerves to the muscle in 
the eyelid, and that muscle at once 
shuts down the eyelid. It would 
seem that this would take a long 


time, but it is done so quickly that 
we get from it the common expres¬ 
sion as “ quick as a wink.” When 
the eye winks, the eyeball is not 
only shut in, it is moved back a little 
way in the socket ; and at the same 
time the muscles of the eyebrow and 
of the face below the eye are drawn 
together so as to make a kind of 
cushion which saves the bone from 
being cracked when a blow falls on 
it. So the eyes are defended on all 
sides except directly in front, and 
this is the reason why this tender 
organ meets with so few accidents. 

Still, it is never safe to strike the 
eyes, and children should be very 
careful how they aim a blow near 
them, either in anger or in play, for 
the loss of sight is a dreadful calam¬ 
ity which can never be cured. The 
historian Prescott, while a student 
at Harvard College, had one of his 
eyes hit by a crust of bread, which 
a fellow student threw at him in fun 
across the table. It was hurt so 
that he could only just tell the differ¬ 
ence between light and darkness with 
that eye, and the use of the other 
one alone in his studies hurt that 
one so that he was nearly blind for 
several years, and during all the last 
half of his life he could scarcely see 
to write at all, and could only read 
for a few minutes each day. 

The word eye is from the Anglo- 
Saxon eage, eye. 





F 


FALCON. The family of birds of 
prey called by this name include, be¬ 
sides the true falcons, the EAGLES, 
BUZZARDS, KITES, and HAWKS. 
The true falcons are found all over 
the world, and in almost all climates. 
They are large, strong birds, with 
long wings, and fly very high. Their 
beaks and talons are curved and 
sharp, fitted for tearing their prey, 
which is chiefly other birds, but they 
attack also small mammals. When 
chasing their prey they hover over it 
in the air, and then dart down upon 
it. 

The kind of falcon most common 
in the United States is usually called 
the duck-hawk, because it feeds 
much on wild ducks. It has been 
seen to pounce down upon a large 
duck on the wing, and even to carry 
off a wounded duck within a few 
yards of the hunter who has shot it. 
It flies off with its prey to some 
quiet place, strips the feathers off 
the breast, and tears off and eats the 
flesh. It builds its nest of coarse 
sticks on some high ledge of rocks, 
and lays reddish brown eggs, 
splotched with darker brown. 

In old times, before gunpowder 
was known, falcons were trained to 
hunt other birds, especially the 
HERON. Falconry, or hawking, as 
it was usually called, became a favor¬ 
ite sport with kings and nobles, and 
the grand falconer,who had charge of 
the king’s falcons, was an important 
person at court. When gentlemen 
went hawking, they rode out each 
carrying a falcon on his wrist, the 
bird’s head being covered with a 


little hood so that it could not see. 
As soon as any game was found, the 
hood was taken off and the falcon 
rose up flying in circles high into the 
air until *it got above the prey, when 
it swooped down, caught it in its tal¬ 
ons, and brought it to its master. 
After catching a bird the falcon was 
always given some food, after eating 
which it was hooded again until 
more game was seen. This sport 
was once so fashionable in England 
that persons of rank generally had a 
hawk sitting on their wrists when 
they went out , and even now fash¬ 
ionable people sometimes go hawk¬ 
ing for amusement. 

In Persia the falcon is trained to 
hunt the gazelle. When a gazelle is 
seen, two birds are loosed, and one 
of them darts on to the nose of the 
animal and holds it tight with its 
talons, flapping its wings so as to 
blind its eyes. The gazelle stops 
and tries to shake off the bird. If 
it gets it off, the other falcon at 
once seizes it, and thus they take 
turns, hindering the gazelle’s flight 
until the dogs come up with it. The 
blue antelope is caught in the same 
way in India, where parties of 
ladies and gentlemen ride out on 
elephants, carrying their falcons 
with them. The Arabs of the 
Sahara desert also train falcons to 
hunt. In China and Japan, too, 
hawking is a favorite amusement. 

The falcons belong to the order 
raf tores, or BIRDS of prey. 

The word falcon comes from the 
Latin falx , a sickle, the bird’s claws 
being curved like a sickle. 



FAN 


226 


FEATHERS 


FAN, an instrument for cooling 
the person by setting the air in 
motion. Fans have been used from 
the earliest times by almost all na¬ 
tions. Ancient kings had fan-bear¬ 
ers, who attended them on almost 
all occasions, carrying large fans of 
gay feathers, with which they 
shielded them from the sun and 
cooled their persons. These fans 
were sometimes borne as standards 
in time of war. Among the Greeks 
and Romans fans were mostly car¬ 
ried by slaves, who attended their 
masters or mistresses with them, and 
fanned the guests at meals. From 
the middle ages up to the present 
time fans have been considered 
articles of necessity as well as of 
luxury among all European nations, 
and much taste and skill have been 
expended on their manufacture. 

The most beautiful fans are now 
made in Paris, Vienna, Brussels, and 
Geneva, but many very fine and 
costly ones are made in England 
and the United States. In Paris 
there are several thousand persons 
whose sole business is to make fans. 
They are divided into four distinct 
trades, each having its own work¬ 
shops and workmen, and each mak¬ 
ing only one part of the fan. 
Almost all the French fans, from the 
cheapest to the most costly ones, 
pass through at least twenty differ¬ 
ent hands before they are finished ; 
and a great number of materials, 
including ivory, mother - of - pearl, 
tortoise-shell, bone, various woods 
and metals, whalebone, silk, satin, 
parchment, paper, lambskin, gauze, 
and feathers, are used in their 
manufacture. 

Most of the common fans in use 
in the United States are made in 
China and Japan. The cheapest 
kinds are of palm leaf, and of split 
bamboo covered with paper. The 
paper covered ones are made either 
entirely open or to open and shut, 
and are often gayly painted and lac¬ 
quered or japanned. Many of these 
are so pretty that they are used to 


decorate walls, to loop back cur¬ 
tains, to make cornices, etc. The 
Chinese and Japanese make also ex¬ 
pensive fans of ivory, bone, mother- 
of-pearl, sandal wood, tortoise-shell, 
and feathers. Chinese ivory fans are 
sometimes made entirely of ivory, 
beautifully carved in open work, but 
they are not so light and easy to 
handle as those covered with silk or 
paper. 

In China and Japan a fan is car¬ 
ried by gentlemen in the streets, 
much as a cane is carried by gentle¬ 
men in other countries. The pic¬ 
tures painted on their fans often 
have a meaning, some of them being 
meant to give information like a 
newspaper, and some being carica¬ 
tures of public or well-known people. 
Chinese and Japanese jugglers are 
very skilful in using the fan. One 
of them will sit and calmly fan him¬ 
self, and at the same time keep in 
the air a pair of paper butterflies, 
which will fly round his head with 
all the motions of real butterflies, 
now lighting on the edge of his fan 
or on a flower, and now chasing 
each other high up in the air and 
then coming back to flit round his 
head again. 

The word fan comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon farm , which is related 
to the Latin vannus, a fan for win¬ 
nowing or cleaning grain. 

FEATHERS, the covering of birds. 
All feathers are made alike in their 
general form, although they differ 
greatly in size, strength, and color. 
Each one has a quill, or barrel, 
shown at a in the picture, a shaft, 
b b, and a vane, beard, or web, c c. 
The quill is a hollow homy tube, 
made of hardened albumen. It has 
an opening at the bottom, e, and 
one where it joins the shaft, f, and 
has inside a thin dry core. The 
shaft is smaller and longer than the 
quill, and is nearly flat on each of its 
four sides. It is made of a white 
spongy substance called the pith, 
covered with a thin horny sheath. 
The vane or beard, which is in two 






FEATHERS 


227 


FEATHERS 


parts, one on each side of the shaft, 
is formed of many small flat plates or 
scales, which grow out of the sides of 
the shaft, and lie with their flat sides 
close to each other. These sides 
have along their upper edges little 
hooks, or barbules, by means of 
which they hold fast to each other, 
so that the sur¬ 
face of the beard 
is close and 
smooth and does 
not open when 
the bird is flying. 
In some birds, 
like the ostrich, 
these barbules do 
not hook very 
tightly together, 
and this makes 
their feathers 
more soft and 
plumy than those 
of other birds. At 
the bottom of the 
beard, next to the 
quill, there is 
usually a small 
feathery tuft, d, 
called the plum¬ 
ule, or accessory 
plume. Besides 
the feathers, 
many birds have next to the skin a 
soft fleecy covering called down, 
which is made up of very small 
feathers. 

Feathers grow very fast, and almost 
all birds change them every year. 
Young birds are covered first with 
down, which gives way to feathers 
as they grow older, but it generally 
takes from one to five years before 
the plumage is fully grown. Feath¬ 
ers vary in size and in form in dif¬ 
ferent parts of the body, and have 
been given different names by those 
who write about birds. Most birds 
have a small gland, or kind of bag, 
at the base of the tail, from which 
they squeeze out oil with their bill 
and spread it over their feathers. 
This is partly the reason why birds’ 
feathers shed water. 



Feather. 


Feathers have three principal uses 
in the arts : for making PENS, for 
stuffing beds, pillows, etc., and for 
ornament. Goose feathers are the 
best for beds, because they are 
softer and more springy than others, 
but turkey, duck, and hen feathers 
are used for cheap beds. The feath¬ 
ers are better when plucked from 
the living bird, and geese kept for 
this purpose are picked three or four 
times a year. Much preparation is 
needed before the feathers are fit to 
put into beds, such as steeping in 
lime water, washing in clean water, 
drying, steaming, beating, etc. 

Of ornamental feathers those of the 
ostrich are most prized, especially 
the large white plumes from the 
back and tail of the male bird ; but 
many other birds, such as the pea¬ 
cock, swan, turkey, pheasant, cock, 
heron, egret, osprey, eagle, ibis, 
rhea, emu, adjutant, grebe, mara¬ 
bout stork, and bird of paradise, 
yield feathers used for ornament. 
In preparing ostrich plumes for use 
they are tied up in bundles and 
washed in warm soap and water to 
free them from grease. The soap is 
then washed out in clean hot water, 
and they are bleached in boiling 
water into which some Spanish 
white has been put. After rinsing 
they are drawn quickly through cold 
water with a little indigo in it, and 
are then steamed over sulphur fumes 
and dried. The shafts are scraped 
to make them limber, and the fila¬ 
ments or feathery parts are curled 
by drawing the edge of a blunt knife 
over them. Other feathers are 
dressed in a less careful way, and 
are often dyed of many beautiful 
colors. 

Feathers are largely used for mak¬ 
ing FANS, and in some countries 
great fans or screens are always car¬ 
ried by attendants to shade the king. 
Large fans made of ostrich plumes 
are usually borne behind the Pope on 
great occasions. The Aztecs or 
Mexicans made beautiful robes of 
colored feathers, and in the Sand- 






FELDSPAR 


228 


FERNS 


wich Islands a splendid mantle made 
of many thousands of feathers of the 
rarest birds was for a long time 
worn by the king when he was 
crowned, and on other great occa¬ 
sions. This costly cloak was buried 
with one of the late kings. In Arctic 
countries people make coats out of 
birds’ skins, wearing them with the 
feathers inside. The Turks and 
Persians wear egret feathers in their 
turbans, soldiers wear cocks’ feath¬ 
ers in their hats, the Scotch High¬ 
landers wear eagles’ feathers in their 
bonnets, and the Zulus of Africa and 
the North American Indians orna¬ 
ment their hair with them. Wings 
and feathers of many kinds of birds 
are worn by ladies in their hats, and 
the skins of the swan, penguin, and 
other birds, with the feathers on 
them, are used for muffs, dress lin¬ 
ings, tippets, cuffs, etc. 

The word feather is from the 
Anglo-Saxon father , feather. 

FELDSPAR, a very common min¬ 
eral made up mostly of alumina 
(aluminum oxide), silica (see Sili¬ 
con), and POTASH, and found chiefly 
in GRANITE, gneiss, and other ig¬ 
neous rocks. It is usually white 
or flesh color, but sometimes bluish 
or greenish. Most kinds of CLAY 
are made from decayed feldspar, and 
those which have most feldspar in 
them, such as kaolin, are much used 
in making porcelain (see Pottery). 

The word feldspar is from the 
German feldspatk, fieldspar, from 
feld y field, and sfiath, spar. 

FELT, a kind of cloth made by the 
pressing together of the fur and 
wool of animals. Although hairs 
and the fibres or threads of wool feel 
and look smooth and even, they are 
really notched or jagged all along 
their sides, the edges of the notches 
or scales all pointing upward, that 
is, from the root to the point. This 
can readily be seen when they are 
looked at through the MICROSCOPE. 
When beaten or pressed together, 
hairs begin to move root first, and 
keep on moving until they meet 


others coming from the opposite 
way, when they twist round each 
other and lock their jagged edges 
together. By keeping up the beat¬ 
ing all the hairs will finally work to¬ 
gether until they form a close mass 
or mat, which is called felt. Only 
fur and wool will felt, for neither 
silk, cotton, flax, nor hemp fibres 
have the right kind of edges. Curled 
hairs twine together more closely 
than straight ones ; therefore wool, 
the fibres of which are curly, makes 
the best felt. Woollen garments 
when washed often shrink and be¬ 
come thicker, because the fibres felt 
together. Felt is used in the man¬ 
ufacture of HATS and in the making 
of common printed carpets, drug¬ 
gets, table-covers, etc. 

The word felt is Anglo-Saxon. 

FENNEL, a plant cultivated in 
gardens for its seeds, which are of a 
spicy and agreeable flavor. The 
Italians and the Germans use them 
in cookery, and they are sometimes 
chewed by country people. Young 
fennel sprouts make good salad, and 
the leaves are used for seasoning fish 
sauces. 

The word fennel is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fenol, fennel. 

FERNS. In the United States 
ferns are only small PLANTS, but in 
very hot countries they grow into 
large trees as high as a four-story 
house and as large round as a man’s 
body. What are commonly called 
the leaves of ferns are properly 
fronds. A frond is something be¬ 
tween a stem and a leaf ; and as it 
is hard to tell in ferns where the stem 
ends and the leaf begins, we call 
them fronds. The frond, which is 
rolled up in the bud, is often very 
long when it unfolds, in tree ferns 
being sometimes more than four 
times as long as a man. As ferns 
have no flowers, the seed-holders 
grow on the under side or on the 
edges of the fronds, in the form of 
little capsules or pods, filled with 
seeds called spores. When ripe 
these pods often burst and throw the 




FERNS 


229 


FIFE 


•spores around, and from them new 
ferns grow. In the common rock 
fern the spore cups may be seen in 
two rows of brownish dots on the 
under side of the frond, one on each 
side of the rib. In the fern called hart’s 
tongue they are arranged in the same 
way, but are oblong; in maiden 
hair a part of the edge of the frond 
is folded over the pods ; and 
in the brake the whole edge is folded 
over them. 

There are more than two thou¬ 
sand kinds of ferns in all parts of the 
world. Most of them grow in warm 
countries, and there are more of 
them in damp places, such as islands, 
than on continents. There are many 
kinds in the West India Islands and 
in the islands of the Pacific. Large 
tree ferns grow in India, Japan, New 
Zealand, and the Sandwich Islands. 
In the South Sea Islands a tree fern 
called taro used to make the chief 
food of the people, and it is still 
much eaten. The roots, the part 
eaten, are cut into pieces and stacked 
in the air, where they are left to cure 
for about a year. When cured they 
are roasted and then beaten on a 
stone, when the woody parts come 
out in threads and leave a very good 
kind of flour. In Hawaii the whole 
stem of a tree fern is often baked in 
the steam which comes up from the 
cracks of the volcanoes, and eaten 
with salt. The stems and ribs of 
some ferns are woven into baskets 
and hats, and the roots of others are 
used in medicine, and the fronds of 
several kinds have a very pleasant 
smell and are used to scent cocoanut 
oil. 

Many ferns are now cultivated, 
both in the open air and in hot 
houses. Many are also raised in 
glass cases, called Wardian cases, 
from a Mr. Ward of England, who 
first found out that ferns would grow 
in them. They are closed up from 
the air, and ferns grow as well in 
them as in the open air. They 
make very pretty ornaments for 
rooms. 


In the early ages of the world ferns 
formed a large part of the plants then 
growing, and many were very much 
larger than any now living. A 
great deal of the hard COAL which 
we burn was made by the decay of 
these immense ferns. 

The word fern is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fearn , fern. 

FERRET, a small animal of the 
weasel kind, to which belong also 
the sable, ermine, marten, polecat, 
mink, skunk, etc. The ferret has 
a small slim body, usually about a 
foot long, with very short legs and a 
tail about five inches long. Its 
color is generally yellow and black, 
but many albinos are seen, which 
has caused people to think that all 
ferrets are white. It lies hidden in 
hollow trees, holes in walls, or in 
burrows during the day, and glides 
out at night after its prey, which is 
mostly rabbits, rats, birds, or small 
reptiles. It seizes its prey just 
back of the ears, drives its teeth 
through the spine, and after it is 
dead sucks its -blood. Ferrets are 
trained to catch rabbits. They are 
either sent into the burrows muzzled 
to drive the rabbits out into nets, or 
are sent in unmuzzled with a string 
fastened to them to pull them out 
when they have caught one. They 
are also used to catch rats and 
mice, of which they will soon rid a 
house by following them into their 
holes. 

The ferret is a MAMMAL of the 
order carnivora, or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the weasel family. 

The word ferret, French fnret, is 
from the Latin fur, thief. 

FIFE, a small wind musical instru¬ 
ment, used with the drum for play¬ 
ing military music. It is a short 
tube closed at one end, with holes in 
it. The player blows into the hole 
nearest the closed end, and makes 
the tune by closing and opening the 
other holes with his fingers. The 
music is very shrill. The fife is a 
very ancient instrument, having been 
used by the Greeks. 





FIG 


230 


FILIGREE 


The word fife is in French Jifre , 
in German pfeife , and in Italian 
piffaro , and is perhaps related to 
the Latin pipa, a pipe. 

FIG, the fruit of a tree which 
grows wild in Asia and North Af¬ 
rica, and is much cultivated in 
warm countries. The tree is some¬ 
times three times as high as a man, 
but is generally only a shrub. It 
bears several crops of fruit each 
year. There are nearly fifty kinds 
of figs, some of which are yellow 
when ripe, and others white, green, 
brown, or black. Fresh figs are very 
sweet and delicious, but many do 
not like them at first ; after a time, 
however, they prefer them to dried 
figs. The figs which are brought to 
the United States come mostly from 
Smyrna, where they are dried and 
pressed into boxes. In some of the 
Southern States figs will ripen in 
the open air, but in the Middle and 
Northern States they are generally 
raised in hot-houses. 

The word fig is from the Anglo- 
Saxon Jic , which is from the Latin 
ficus , fig. 

FILBERT. See Hazel. 

FILE, a steel tool with sharp teeth, 
used for cutting down or smoothing 
the surfaces of metals, wood, etc. 
A rasp is a kind of file, but it has 
coarse, single teeth, made by blows 
of a punch, instead of long teeth 
cut across by blows of a chisel. 
Files are made of many different 
shapes, flat, square, triangular or 
three-sided, round, etc., and vary 
from about one inch to nearly a yard 
long. They are made of the best 
steel, but they are of different de¬ 
grees of hardness, according to the 
kind of work they are made for. 

In making a file, a piece of bar 
steel is heated red hot and is then 
forged, or hammered into shape, on 
an ANVIL. The blank, as it is now 
called, is then heated in an oven 
and allowed to cool slowly, which 
softens the steel by taking the CAR¬ 
BON out of it. It is next ground 
down smooth on a grindstone, or 


filed down if it is a small file blank. . 
The blanks thus prepared are then 
taken to the file-cutter, who sits 
astride of a bench in front of a stone 
anvil. He lays a blank on the anvil, 
holding it tightly in place by means 
of a leather strap which passes under 
his feet, and then cuts the teeth in 
it one by one with a chisel held in 
his left hand, striking it with a ham¬ 
mer held in his right hand. Each 
tooth is made singly with one blow, 
which is struck slanting, so that a 
burr, or ridge of metal, is raised only 
on one side of the cut. The cuts 
are made with the greatest regular¬ 
ity, each one being exactly the same 
distance apart and of the same 
depth. Most files are double cut, 
that is, they have two rows of cuts 
which cross each other. The sec¬ 
ond row is cut in the same way with 
the first, but the cuts are closer to¬ 
gether and not quite so deep. There 
are many machines for cutting files, 
which do very fine work, but it is said 
that hand-made files are the best. 

The files are then hardened by 
heating them and cooling them sud¬ 
denly in water, after which they are 
scoured in sand, washed with lime- 
water, dried, and rubbed with olive 
oil and turpentine ; and after each 
one has been tested they are put up 
in packages for market. 

The word file 'is from the Anglo- 
Saxon feol , file. 

FILIGREE, a delicate kind of work 
made of fine gold or silver wire. The 
wire is mostly made flat instead of 
round, and is twisted into spirals 
and other forms, which are afterward 
joined together into a kind of me¬ 
tallic lace-work, and made into orna¬ 
ments of various kinds. Filigree 
work is made mostly in India, Tur¬ 
key, and Italy. It is sometimes called 
Maltese work, because much of it is 
made in Malta. The natives of 
Sumatra are also skilful filigree 
workers, both in gold and silver, 
and the Chinese make silver filigree, 
but of an inferior kind. 

The word filigree is from the Ital- 






FILTER 


231 


FIR 


ian filigrana , filigree, from filo , Lat¬ 
in filum , a thread or wire, and 
grano, Latin granu?n, a grain or 
bead, the old filigree work being 
often ornamented with beads. 

FILTER, anything which strains 
dirt and settlings out of liquids. 
Common rain water is usually yel¬ 
lowish on account of the fine dust, 
smoke, and other impurities which 
it gathers in falling through the air. 
But after it has been strained 
through the earth and has run into 
springs and wells, it is clear and 
bright. This is because the beds of 












=-m—PIT- 



S3 

> 



Common Filter. 


sand and gravel through which it 
trickles are natural filters which 
take out all impurities and colors. 
Filters used in houses to make water 
clear, work in just the same way. 
In former times sand and gravel was 
mostly used in them ; but as they 
will not take gases (see Element) 
out of water, charcoal is now gen¬ 
erally used with it. Charcoal is 
the best of all things for filtering. 
The dirtiest water poured through it 
comes out sweet, clear, and bright. 
Animal charcoal, made from burnt 
bones, is better than wood charcoal 


for this, because it will take up much 
more gas and will destroy all ani¬ 
mal matter in water. 

Filters are very necessary where 
water is not perfectly pure, because 
such water is apt to cause sickness. 
Indeed, a great part of the sickness 
in cities and villages is caused by 
drinking impure water. Water 
which is roiled or which has any un¬ 
pleasant smell or taste about it should 
never be drunk until it has been fil¬ 
tered. 

There are many kinds of filters, 
but most of them work in nearly 
the same way. One of the simplest 
kinds is shown in the picture. In this 
a is a wooden box, open on one side, 
with a shelf, m, near the bottom, 
leaving room enough under it for the 
pitcher, b. On the shelf is put a com¬ 
mon stone jar, c c, which has a hole 
in the bottom fitted with a faucet 
which comes through the hole, e, in 
the shelf. A large sponge, /, is 
first put over the hole in the jar, and 
over this a piece of thin muslin, g. 
Next some clean, white sand, h , is 
put in, then some charcoal, z, 
pounded fine, and lastly some small 
pebbles,/. In the top of the jar is 
set a common flower-pot, d , with a 
sponge, k, in the hole in its bot¬ 
tom. Such a filter is made to sit 
under a hydrant, so that water can 
run through it all the time ; but it 
may also be put where water can be 
pumped into it, or it may be filled 
by a bucket. When the flower-pot 
is kept filled with water, the water, 
/, runs through the sponge, k, and 
then through the other layers until 
it comes through the faucet, e , into 
the pitcher. It will then be clear 
and sweet, even if muddy when it 
went in at the top. 

The word filter ought to be spelled 
felter, as it is made from FELT, which 
was once much used to strain liq¬ 
uids through. 

FIR, a cone-bearing tree, belong¬ 
ing to the same family with the 
spruce and the hemlock. The firs 
grow mostly in cold countries, though 























FIRE 


232 


FIRE 


some are found in Mexico. The 
balsam fir is common in the North¬ 
ern United States and in Canada. 
Its wood is not worth much for tim¬ 
ber, but it has a valuable juice, which 
comes out through its bark and 
looks like honey, called Canada bal¬ 
sam or balm of Gilead. When 
mixed with spirits of turpentine this 
makes a good varnish for maps, and 
it is also used for mounting objects 
for the microscope. On the Pa¬ 
cific coast of America is found the 
noble silver fir, which grows two 
hundred feet high, or as high as an 
ordinary church steeple. 

The word fir is from the Anglo- 
Saxon furh. 

FIRE. Burning, as is told in the 
article Oxygen, is only the union 
of oxygen with something else. 
When this union takes place slowly, 
heat is made, but we see no fire or 
light ; when it takes place quickly, 
both heat is felt and fire or flame is 
seen. When iron rusts, it is the 
same kind of burning as when wood 
blazes in the fire : but the oxygen 
of the air unites with the iron so 
slowly that the heat is not enough to 
be felt. If the union be made to 
take place quickly, both heat will be 
felt and light will be seen. When 
the heel of your boot strikes a 
stone, you often see a spark fly from 
it. This is burning iron. The iron 
nail in your heel strikes the stone, a 
bit of it is knocked off, and heat 
enough is made by the blow to 
cause the iron to unite with the oxy¬ 
gen of the air, and thus we see it 
burn. A piece of iron or steel may 
easily be heated enough to make it 
burn in a jar of oxygen, and a most 
brilliant light will be given off by it. 
When wood or coal is set on fire, 
it gives out both heat and light ; 
but if we could give it still more 
oxygen it would burn still brighter. 
We do this when we blow a fire with 
the bellows, and this is the reason 
why it then blazes up and burns 
more briskly. Some things take 
fire, that is unite with oxygen, 


much more easily than others. 
When we scratch a match it at once 
bursts into flame. This is because 
it has a little phosphorus on the 
end, and this has such a liking for 
oxygen that it has usually to be kept 
in water to keep it from uniting with 
it. The phosphorus on the end of 
the match is mixed with glue, which 
keeps it from taking fire ; but when 
the match is scratched on any rough 
thing heat enough is made to cause 
the phosphorus to unite quickly 
with the oxygen of the air, and it 
bursts into flame. Wood and coal 
have not so great a liking for oxy¬ 
gen as phosphorus, and need much 
more heat to make them unite with 
oxygen. 

A burning candle is a small fire, 
and by studying it we can easily find 
out much about fire and flame. The 
wick and the tallow will not unite 
with oxygen at the common heat of 
the air, but need to be raised to a 
higher heat. If we hold a lighted 
match to the wick, it will soon be 
heated enough, and will unite with 
the oxygen around it and burst into 
flame. The burning wick gives 
some of its heat to the tallow, 
which melts and is sucked up by 
the wick and becomes warm enough 
to burn also. Thus the tallow is 
heated little by little and both it and 
the wick burn up, and, so far as we 
can see, are lost. But are they really 
lost? No, the carbon, of which 
the wick and the tallow are mostly 
made up, has united with the oxy¬ 
gen of the air, and formed car¬ 
bonic acid, and this has passed 
off as a gas into the air and mixed 
with it. Not a bit of the carbon has 
been lost ; it has only united with 
the oxygen of the air to form another 
substance. The tallow and the 
wick have in them some hydro¬ 
gen as well as carbon, and when 
the candle burns this also unites with 
the oxygen of the air, and this union 
forms WATER. If you hold a cool, 
dry tumbler over the flame of a 
burning candle, the inside of the 







FIRE 


233 


FIRE 


glass will become dimmed at once, 
and little drops of water will collect 
on it. If we could keep the glass 
always cool we could easily get a 
cup of water in this way by burning 
candles. This water passes off 
from the flame as a hot STEAM, 
which cannot be seen ; and when we 
hold the cool glass over the candle 
it is cooled and turned into water. 

We thus see that the tallow and 
the wick have not been destroyed, 
but have been changed into carbonic 
acid and water, and this change has 
produced heat and light. It is the 
same when a wood or a coal fire 
bums : the hydrogen and the carbon 
in them turn into steam and car¬ 
bonic aid gas, and fly away up the 
chimney and mix with the air. 

I have said that the melted tallow 
of the candle burns, but it is really 
turned into a gas by the heat, and it 
is the gas which burns or unites with 
the oxygen of the air. This gas is 
hydrogen gas filled with particles of 
carbon, and is much the same as 
common coal gas. Indeed, a candle 
is a small gas 
works, in which 
gas is distilled 
(see Alcohol) 
from tallow, or 
whatever the can¬ 
dle is made of, 
just as common 
GAS is distilled 
from coal. The 
flame of a candle 
is made up of 
three parts, as 
shown in the pic¬ 
ture, Fig. 1. In 
the inside of it is 
a space (1) filled with gas which is 
not burning. You can prove this 
by putting one end of a glass tube 
into the black centre of the flame ; 
the unburnt gas will pass through 
the tube and may be lighted at the 
other end. The part next to this 
inside space, marked 2 in the pic¬ 
ture, is the one which gives off the 
most light. Some of the oxygen 



Fig. 1.—Flame of 
Candle. 


from the outer air gets into this, 
but not enough to oxidize or burn 
both the hydrogen and the carbon, 
and as it likes the hydrogen best it 
unites with that and burns it. Hy¬ 
drogen makes a very hot flame, but 
does not give much light. In burn¬ 
ing, however, it heats the floating 
particles of carbon while hot, and 
this is what makes the light. In the 
outer part of the flame (3) the oxy¬ 
gen unites freely with the carbon, 
and makes carbonic acid, which 
passes off into the air. This burn¬ 
ing of the carbon makes much heat, 
but very little light. Thus the light 
of a candle, lamp, or gas flame is 
due to the fact that the hydrogen 
and carbon that make up its gas 
do not burn at the same time ; the 
hydrogen burns first, and this heats 
the particles of carbon to a white 
heat, and these particles give the 
light. If you look closely at a gas 
jet you will see it sparkle brightly. 
These little sparks are the particles 
of carbon heated white hot by the 
hydrogen, and which do not burn up 
until they get to the outside of the 
flame. When there is not enough 
oxygen to burn up all the carbon, 
the carbon passes off in little parti¬ 
cles as soot, and we say that the 
candle or the fire smokes. 

Some travellers have told stories 
about races of men in the world who 
had never seen fire nor heard of it, 
but these tales are very doubtful, 
and it is probable that even the most 
savage races have known its use. 
The old Hindoos and Greeks 
thought that fire was stolen and 
brought down from heaven by man ; 
but some ancient peoples thought 
that fire was an animal. Herodotus 
the historian says that the Egyptians 
believed it to be a living beast, which 
eats everything it can seize, and 
when filled with food dies of it. The 
Australians have a singular story 
about the way in which they first 
got fire. They say that a long time 
ago a little bandicoot (a sharp-nosed 
Australian animal, somewhat like a 






FIRE 


234 


FIRE 


Guinea pig) was the sole owner of a 
fire-brand, and so selfish was he that 
he refused to share it with the other 
animals. So the animals held a 
council and decided to get the fire 
away from the bandicoot, and they 



Fig. 2.—Making Fire by Rubbing Wood. 

appointed the hawk and the pigeon 
to do it. They tried to persuade 
him at first to share the blessing 
with his neighbors, but he refused, 
and the pigeon made a dash to seize 
it. The bandicoot threw the fire¬ 
brand toward the river, hoping to 
put it out, but the sharp-eyed hawk, 
seeing it falling, knocked it with a 
stroke of his wing far over the river 
into the long, dry grass. The fire 
caught, the flames spread over the 
country, and the people felt the fire 
and found that it was good. 

We, who can make fire by simply 
striking a match, would think it very- 
hard if we had to rub together two 
pieces of wood until they grew so hot 
as to blaze before we could make 
a fire. But it is probable that this 
was one of the first ways of making 
a fire. The Sandwich Islanders, and 
the people of Tahiti, New Zealand, 
and other islands of the Pacific 
Ocean, used to kindle their fires by 
rubbing a pointed stick up and down 
upon a piece of soft dry wood, as 
shown in the picture. They could 
make fire in this way in a few sec¬ 
onds. Another instrument for fire 


| making, called the fire-drill, is shown 
J in Fig. 3. This was used by the 
I ancient Mexicans, and in Australia, 
j China, South Africa, and other 
| places. The Esquimaux have a 
different way of turning the fire-drill, 
which can be seen in Fig. 4. One 
man holds a cross-piece which has 
a hollow on the under side for the 
top of the drill to fit into, and presses 
down hard on it, while the other 
man turns it by pulling first one end 
and then the other of a cord twisted 
round it. The Sioux, Dacotahs, 
and some other of the North Amer¬ 
ican Indians, turn the drill in still 
another way, by means of a bow, 
with a loose string, which is wound 
once around the drill, as shown in 
the picture (Fig. 5). In this, 1 is a 
stone, held by a man’s left hand, 
with a hollow in it to hold the upper 
end of the drill, and 2 is a piece of 
wood in which the lower point turns ; 
3 is the bow, held by the right 
hand, and 4the drill, and 5 is apiece 
of punk or some other light and dry 
thing which another man is holding 
to catch the fire. The Iroquois In¬ 



dians used a kind of pump-drill, like 
the one shown in Fig. 3 in the article 
Drill. 

Many other ways of getting fire 
have been used by other peoples. 

















FIRE 


235 


FIREFLY 


The Greeks and Romans struck 
sparks from flints with a piece of 
hard iron or steel, but they knew 
also the use of the burning-glass or 


lens. Some of the North American 
Indians and the Indians of Terra del 
Fuego also knew how to strike fire 
with flints, and the Chinese use both 



Fig. 4.—Esquimau Fire-Drill. 


flint and steel and the burning- 
glass. In China, too, fire is some¬ 
times made by striking together two 
pieces of bamboo, the bamboo hav¬ 
ing silica (see Silicon) enough in 
its outer skin to make it strike fire. 



The word fire comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon word fyr , which is 
much like the Greek word pur. 


FIREFLY, the common name of 
several kinds of BEETLES, which 
give out light when flying. They 
are sometimes called also fire beetles 
and lightning bugs. There are two 
classes of them, one of which is 
found in Central and South America 
and the West Indies, and the other 
in Europe and the United States. 
One kind, called the lightning spring 
beetle because when it falls on its 
back it springs into the air so as to 
get on its feet again, is more than 
an inch long, and gives forth such a 
beautiful bright light that the Cuban 
and Mexican ladies use them as orna¬ 
ments. 

The Indians catch them by hold¬ 
ing up burning coals on the end of a 
stick, which draws the insects to 
them. They sell them to ladies, 
who shut them up in small cages of 
fine wire, and feed them on bits of 
sugar cane. They also have to bathe 
them frequently to keep them alive. 
When they wish to use them, they 























FIREWORKS 


236 


FIREWORKS 


sew them up in little bags of lace or 
gauze, which they pin on their 
skirts, or twist them up in lace neck¬ 
laces or girdles. Sometimes they 
put a long pin through them, under 
the chest, which does not hurt them, 
and stick them in their hair, with 
humming birds and real diamonds, 
thus making a very beautiful head¬ 
dress. The Indians use these fire¬ 
flies to light their dwellings, several 
of them together giving out light 
enough to read by. 

The fireflies which abound on 
summer evenings in the United 
States are smaller 
than the lightning 
spring beetles, 
and give much 

less light. The 

glow - worms of 
Europe belong to 
Glowworms. the same class 

Female. Male. with them. Only 

the male can fly, 
the female, which gives out a much 
brighter light, being wingless. The 
light of fireflies is given out from 
the lower parts of the abdomen, but 
we do not yet know exactly what 
causes it. 

Fireflies belong to the order cole- 
optera , or sheath-winged insects. 

The word firefly is made up of 
fire and FLY. 

FIREWORKS. There are so many 
kinds of fireworks and so many 
things are used in making them that 
only a few of them can be told about 
in this short article. Among the 
most common kinds are fire-crack¬ 
ers, torpedoes, sky-rockets, Roman 
candles, Catharine wheels, and Ben¬ 
gal lights. Fire-crackers are only a 
little gunpowder rolled up in very 
tough paper, with a twisted roll of 
match paper sticking out of one end 
to light them by. They are brought 
from China, where they can be made 
much cheaper than in any other 
country, because labor is so cheap. 
The wholesale price in China of a 
pack of fire-crackers, which are sold 
here at eight cents, is only two cents. 


As there are eighty in each pack, a 
Chinaman therefore makes forty 
crackers for less than a cent. Most 
fire - crackers are made by poor 
people in their spare time, just as 
toys are made by peasants in Ger¬ 
many. Merchants in Hong Kong 
buy them, pack them in boxes hold¬ 
ing forty packs each, and ship them 
to foreign countries. Those which 
are brought to the United States 
come mostly in sailing vessels around 
Cape Horn. They are so cheap that 
the merchants could not afford to 
pay much for bringing them, so they 
are used as ballast in ships which 
carry silks and teas. The Chinese 
letters printed on the wrappers of 
fire-cracker packs are only the ad¬ 
vertisements of the dealers, telling 
where they can be bought in China. 
Fire - crackers are used almost all 
over the world. In the Northern 
United States they are fired mostly 
on the Fourth of July, but in the 
Southern States Christmas is the 
great time for them. In China they 
are fired chiefly on New Year’s Day, 
but in Canton and some other cities 
they are fired at almost all hours of 
the day and night, because the people 
think the noise will frighten away 
evil spirits. In England they are 
used mostly on the fifth of Novem¬ 
ber, or Guy Fawkes’ Day, and in 
South America on all church and 
other festivals. 

Torpedoes or throwing-crackers 
are made by wrapping up a little ful¬ 
minating powder, or powder which 
goes off with a noise when struck or 
rubbed hard, in pieces of thin paper, 
with some very small gravel stones 
or a little sand. When the torpedo 
is thrown against any hard object 
the gravel rubs the powder and it 
goes off. Torpedoes used here are 
all made in this country, mostly by 
German families around New York 
city. 

Fireworks meant to make a 
show rather than a noise, such as 
rockets and Roman candles, are 
made up mostly of gunpowder, 







FIREWORKS 


237 


FIREWORKS 


and of the things from which gun¬ 
powder are made, saltpetre, sulphur, 
and charcoal. When iron or steel 
filings are mixed in, fireworks burn 
much more brightly and throw out 
beautiful sparks, often seen when 
rockets burst in the air. Copper 
filings make green fire, and zinc 
filings bright blue fire. Yellow fire 
is made by resin, amber, and com¬ 
mon salt, red by lampblack and the 
salts of strontium, and pink by much 
saltpetre. 

The cases for fireworks are made 
by rolling pasted common brown 
paper tightly round a wooden roller, 
and cutting it up when dry in¬ 
to tubes of the right lengths 
for the kind wanted. One 
end is closed up, and the 
powder and other things are 
poured in and rammed down 
with a wooden ramrod. In 
filling rockets, a hollow space 
is left, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture, else the rocket would 
not rise. The match by 
which it is to be fired is then 
put in, and the other end is 
also closed with paper. 
When the tubes are all filled, 
girls finish them by pasting 
around them gilt, silvered, 
and fancy-colored papers. 

A pointed cap of paste- 
Rocket. board is usually put on the 
top of rockets, so that they 
will cut through the air easier, 
and a long stick is fastened to the 
side to act as a balance when 
they go up. If a rocket were sent 
up without any stick, it would fly all 
round like a serpent or squib. 
When rockets reach the end of their 
flight, they often send out clusters of 
stars of different colors, swarms of 
fiery serpents, or showers of gold, 
silver, or colored rain. All of these 
come out of the top part of the 
rocket, where, joined on to the tube, 
is a shorter and broader part filled 
with various kinds of powder made 
into a paste with alcohol, and cut 
into stars or made into round drops 


for rain. The different colors are 
made of various mixtures, some of 
which are told about above. Ser¬ 
pents are made by packing many 
little squibs into the top of the tube 
so that they will all take fire at once. 

Roman candles are made by pack¬ 
ing a little of the same mixture which 
is put into rockets into the bottom 
of the case, then a little gunpowder 
on top of that, then a ball or a star 
on top of the gunpowder, and so on, 
putting in one kind after the other in 
the same order until the tube is 
filled. The balls or stars, which are 
often of several beautiful colors, are 
made up of various things, such as 
sulphur, saltpetre, quartz, antimony, 
gunpowder, etc., mixed together 
with alcohol or gum-water into a 
paste, then made into the shape 
wanted, and dried. When the tube 
is filled the end is closed by pasting 
a piece of match paper round it and 
twisting into a roll. When this is 
fired the Roman candle throws out 
a shower of sparks for a little while, 
and as it burns down the gunpowder 
fires the balls into the air one after 
the other. 

Catharine wheels are so called 
from St. Catharine of Alexandria, 
who was put to death (307 a.d.) 
after being tortured on a wheel. 
They are made of a great many 
sizes, the smallest being usually 
called pin-wheels, because they can 
be fastened up with a pin. They 
are made by filling a long tube of 
paper with powder much like that 
used in rockets, and then winding it 
in a coil round a thin wheel of wood. 
The end of the tube on the outside 
of the wheel is covered with a piece 
of match paper, which is twisted 
into a roll or fuse to light it by. 
When a Catharine wheel is fastened 
up on a post or board so that it will 
turn round easily, and the fuse is 
lighted, the powder in it acts just 
like the powder in the rocket, only it 
pushes the tube round and round in¬ 
stead of straight upward, and thus 
the wheel is made to turn with great 












FISHES 


238 


FISHES 


rapidity. Some wheels are made in 
different parts, and each part of a 
different color, so that it changes as 
it turns. 

Bengal lights are short'tubes filled 
with a mixture of saltpetre, sul¬ 
phur, and antimony. They burn 
with a great glare of bluish-white 
light, and are much used as signals, 
especially by ships at sea. 

Besides the small fireworks used 
mostly by children, there are many 
large kinds which the manufacturers 
call exhibition pieces, because they 
are intended to exhibit on the Fourth 
of July and other great days. These 
pieces, many of which are very 
costly, show when fired such designs 
as flags, shields, eagles, etc. They 
are bought chiefly by cities, and are 
set off in parks or large squares 
where the most people can see them. 

Great numbers of fireworks of all 
kinds are made in factories in New 
Jersey, on Long Island, and in other 
places around New York. The 
Chinese are said to have first made 
fireworks, and a great many are still 
made by them, but those made here 
are much handsomer than any 
brought from China. 

The word firework is made up of 
FIRE and work, Anglo-Saxon weorc. 

FISHES. This class of ANIMALS, 
like other vertebrates, have an inside 
skeleton, with a spinal marrow run¬ 
ning through a backbone, but unlike 
all others they are fitted to live all the 
time in the water. This they are 
able to do because they can breathe 
the air which is mixed with water. 
They have no lungs, like animals 
which breathe common air, but have 
on each side of the head openings 
called gills. These gills have a hard 
outside cover or lid, while the inside 
is made up of a series of fringes 
formed of many little veins filled with 
blood. Fishes take water into the 
mouth and pass it out again through 
the gills, and the air in the water is 
taken up by the blood vessels in the 
fringes and thus passes into the 
other veins and all through the body. 


The heart of fishes is single and not 
double like that of mammals and 
birds. Their blood is cold, like 
that of reptiles, and therefore they 
do not feel changes in the heat or 
cold of the water. This fits them to 
live in the cold waters of the north 
as well as in warmer seas, and many 
kinds, such as the cod and the her¬ 
ring, are found far up in the Arctic 
regions. 

Fishes are nearly of the same 
weight as the water in which they 
live, so that they can move in it with 
great ease. Most of them have also 
an air bladder inside the body, which 
enables them to go up or down in 
the water at will. When a fish 
wishes to go down deep it can press 
the air out of this bladder by means 
of certain muscles, and so increase 
the weight of its body ; and when it 
wishes to rise again it takes off the 
pressure, the bladder fills with air 
again, and its body becomes light 
enough to rise. The form, smooth 
surface, and fins and tails of fishes 
are especially fitted for rapid move¬ 
ment in the water. Their bodies are 
mostly regular in shape and smooth, 
with no angles to catch the water in 
swimming. Instead of having feath¬ 
ers or fur, which would only hinder 
them, and which they do not need 
to keep them warm because they are 
cold-blooded, they have a smooth 
covering of scales, which overlap 
each other like shingles, and are cov¬ 
ered with a kind of slime, which 
helps them to slip through the water. 

Fishes are noted for their beautiful 
colors, which range from gold, silver, 
and copper tints to the loveliest blue, 
green, red, and black. The mack¬ 
erel shows all the colors of the rain¬ 
bow, and the red mullet has been 
celebrated from ancient times for its 
beauty. Among the Romans the 
rich used to have a live mullet put on 
a platter at dinner so that the guests 
might watch the changing of its col¬ 
ors, through all the shades of purple, 
violet, and blue to red and white, as 
it slowly died. In Japan is caught a 






FISHES 


239 


FISHES 


fish called the angel fish, which is of 
a most beautiful sky blue color, 
marked sometimes with rainbow 
tints. 

Fishes swim chiefly with the tail, 
which acts like an oar in sculling. 
Like the fins, it is made of a skin 


stretched over a bony framework. 
Most fishes have four kinds of 
fins, which may be seen in the pic¬ 
ture : one or more on the back, a a t 
called dorsal fins (Latin dorsualis , 
from dorsum , the back) ; a pair of 
side fins, b , called pectoral (Latin 



Fish, showing the different Fins. 

a a , Dorsal fins; b, Pectoral fin of one side ; c, Ventral fins ; d, Anal fin; 
e, Caudal or tail fin; f Cover of gill. 


pectoralis, from pectus , the breast), 
because they are on the sides of the 
breast, near the gills ; a pair beneath, 
c, called ventral fins (Latin ventralis, 
from ve?iter , the belly), because they 
are usually in the middle of the belly ; 
and one or more anal fins, d (from 


Latin anus , the opening of the food 
canal), between the belly and the 
tail. The pectoral fins answer to 
the fore legs and the ventral fins to 
the hind legs of land animals. Their 
use is to keep the fish in an upright 
position in the water, and they also 



Flying Fish. 


aid it in directing its course. The 
other fins, the dorsal and anal, help 
the tail or caudal fin, e (Latin cauda, 
a tail), in pushing the fish forward. 
In the flying fish the pectoral fins 
are so large, as is shown in the pic¬ 
ture, that they are almost equal to 


wings. With their aid the fish can 
spring out of the water and fly 
through the air several hundred feet 
before it drops back again. Most 
fishes can swim very fast. The sal¬ 
mon can go 20 to 25 miles in an hour, 
or as fast as the fastest steamboat. 










FISHES 


240 


FISHES 


Fishes generally have all the 
senses, but those of taste and of 
touch are very dull. They can hear, 
although they have no outside ear. 
Their eyes are usually very large and 
immovable, and their sight is sharp, 
but a few, living in the mud or in 
the waters of caverns, have no eyes 
at all. Fishes’ mouths differ much 
from each other: some have no 
teeth, some have sharp teeth for 
cutting, and some blunt teeth for 
crushing. They live mostly on ani¬ 
mal food, such as worms, snails, 
crabs, lobsters, etc., and many of the 
large fish on little fish. Some swal¬ 
low their food alive, and some tear it 
up before swallowing. 

Most fishes are oviparous (Latin 
oviparus , from ovum , egg, and 
par ere, to bring forth),' that is, their 
young are hatched from EGGS laid by 
the parent. The eggs, which are 
called spawn, are laid in different 
places according to the nature of the 
fish. Some fishes lay them on the 
leaves of water plants or seaweed, 
some on beds of sand or gravel in 
shallow water along the coast, and 
some which live in the ocean lay 
them near the head waters of rivers, 
which they go up every year for this 
purpose. Very few fishes take any 
care of their young, bmt leave their 
eggs to be hatched out by the sun. 
The most valuable fishes lay a great 
many eggs, while others lay but few ; 
thus, the herring lays many thou¬ 
sands and the cod several millions 
every year, but the shark only two. 
The sea would be filled full of fish 
if all the eggs that are laid were 
hatched and raised, but many of the 
eggs are destroyed and great num¬ 
bers of young fish are devoured by 
birds, reptiles, and other fish. 

Fishes are vastly more numerous 
than all the other vertebrates put 
together. Some are fitted to live in 
salt water only, some in fresh water 
only, while others live in both. Some 
live in one place and some wander 
from place to place in great bodies 
called schools. Those which in¬ 


habit shallow waters are of the bright¬ 
est colors, due mostly to the light, 
while those which live in deep water, 
where much light does not reach, 
are generally dull in color. 

Most of the common fishes are 
told about under their own names, 
but there are a great many very sin¬ 
gular fishes in the sea which we have 
not room to describe. For instance, 
in Central America is a fish called 
the dora or hassar, which leaves its 
pond when the water dries up and 
marches overland in large droves in 
search of more water, moving along 
by little leaps ; and in Malabar is a 
small fish called the sennal which 
climbs up the trunks of palm trees 
growingnear the water’s edge. The 
archer fish of Japan lives on insects 
which it shoots with a drop of water 
blown from its long snout. Another 
fish, called the angler, has several 
spines like little fishpoles rising from 
its head, and on the end of each 
hangs a lump which looks like flesh. 
The angler lies hidden with its baits 
hung out, and when small fish come 
to nibble, it catches them. The re¬ 
mora or sucking fish has a flat sucker 
on its head, by which it can fasten 
itself to anything ; and it is said to 
often hang on to a larger fish so as 
to be carried around by it wherever 
it goes. The ancients believed that 
this fish could stop a ship, and Pliny 
says that at the battle of Actium the 
ship of Antony was held so tightly 
by a remora that it could not move, 
and this was why Augustus won the 
battle. These fishes are used in 
catching turtles. Though most 
fishes are mute, there are some 
which make noises like a groan or 
cry. Tunnies cry like children when 
they are taken from the water, and 
in the waters of South America is a 
little white fish, with blue spots on 
its back, which sings all night long, 
the tones sounding like a far-off 
organ. 

The Chinese have raised fish by 
hand from the most ancient times, 
and the Romans bred fish to supply 








FISH HAWK 


241 


FISH HAWK 


their tables. In France, England, 
and other European countries, and 
in several parts of the United States, 
fish-breeding is now carried on with 
much success. Two kinds of fish 
are raised in this country, salmon, in¬ 
cluding trout, and shad. The spawn 
or eggs of the fish, which are pressed 
out with the fingers, are put into 
hatching troughs, or long narrow 
boxes divided into parts by slats on 
the bottom. Cold spring water, fil¬ 
tered through flannel, comes in at 
the head of the trough, passes over 
the eggs, and flows out of the lower 
end. In about two months the eggs 
burst open and the water in the 
troughs becomes filled with millions 
of little wriggling things, which look 
like fish with eggs hung to them. 
These are little sacs from which they 
get their food at first, but in a short 
time they become strong enough to 
take care of themselves, and they are 
then turned loose into the stream, 
from which they find their way at last 
into the sea. In this way many of our 
streams and rivers from which the 
fish had mostly disappeared have 
been filled again with salmon, trout, 
and shad. 

Fishes form the fifth class of ver¬ 
tebrate ANIMALS. 

The word fish is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fisc , fish. 

FISH HAWK. The American 
fish hawk, or osprey, as it is some¬ 
times called, is found almost all over 
the United States, living in the north¬ 
ern parts in the summer and in 
the southern parts in the winter. It 
looks much like the eagle, and is 
quite a large bird, some of them 
measuring five to six feet, or nearly 
the length of a man, across the 
wings. It lives near lakes, rivers, 
and bays, but is sometimes seen 
several hundred miles at sea. It 
never follows game in the air, but 
lives on fish. When, in flying along 
above the water, it sees a fish, it 
closes its wings, and swoops down 
headlong on it, often going entirely 
under water. A fish hawk can carry 


off a fish weighing five pounds, but 
it has been known to strike a fish 
too heavy for it to lift, and to be 
drawn under and drowned ; and the 
next tide sweeps it upon the beach 
with its claws buried deep in its prey. 

The fish hawk has many battles 
with the bald EAGLE, a hungry,thiev¬ 
ish bird, which seldom works when 
it can steal. The eagle watches 
until the fish hawk has caught a fish 
and then pounces upon it. The two 
rise into the air, fighting with beaks 
and claws, but though the fish 
hawk is brave the eagle is the 
stronger and generally gets away 
the fish and carries it off to eat. The 
fish hawk never tries to get back its 
fish, but goes to work to catch 
another one. 

Fish hawks build large pouch¬ 
shaped nests not far from the water, 
in the forks of the pine, oak, and 
other strong trees. They are made 
of sticks, corn stalks, mullein stalks, 
and such things, piled up in a solid 
mass and lined with soft seaweed. 
They are not very deep, but are 
nearly flat on top. These nests are 
built very strong to last, for the fish 
hawk comes back to the same nest 
year after year. It lays three or 
four eggs, a little larger than hens’ 
eggs, yellowish white spotted with 
reddish brown. The eggs are 
hatched about the end of June. The 
female seldom leaves the nest, but 
the male goes fishing and supplies 
the family with food. The young 
ones are very awkward and are 
slow in learning to fly. It is said 
that their parents sometimes have 
to peck them and beat them out with 
their wings before they will leave 
the nest. 

Fishermen say that the fish hawks 
come back in the spring with the 
fish, and they therefore welcome 
them and begin to repair their 
nets and get their hooks and lines 
ready when they appear. They also 
like to have them build their nests 
near where they live, for they think 
they bring good luck. 





FISH-HOOK 


242 


FLAG 


The fish hawk belongs to the order 
raptores , or birds of prey, and to 
the falcon family, which includes 
also other hawks, the falcons, 
and the eagles. 

FISH-HOOK. The best fish-hooks 
are those called Limerick hooks, be¬ 
cause first made in Limerick, Ire- 


a 



Barb of Limerick Hook. 

land. They are hammered square 
out of the best of iron, usually from 
the nails of old horse-shoes, and 
afterwards filed round, the barb 
being filed out of a solid piece, as 
shown in the picture, a being the 
barb hammered out rough, and b 
the barb finished. When finished 
they are hardened by being heated 
in a charcoal fire and then cooled 
suddenly by being put into cold 
water. Limerick hooks are not flat¬ 
tened at the end of the shank, as 


Fish-Hook Making. 

common fish-hooks are, but have 
some little dents filed in it to give a 
hold to the thread by which it is 
fastened on to the line. 

Common fish-hooks are not ham¬ 
mered out but are made from round 
iron wire. The wire is first cut into 
the right lengths for hooks, as shown 
in a, in the second picture. 


The pieces are then softened by 
heating them in a furnace, and the 
workman sets them up, three at a 
time, in a little stand on his work 
bench, and with a sharp knife cuts 
up a slice of the metal near the end 
of each, as shown in b. This makes 
the barb or beard of the hook. The 
point is next filed sharp, as in c , and 
the hook is then bent round the 
outside of a piece of brass fastened 
on a small block of wood, shown 
in e . This gives it the shape d> and 
the end is then flattened down by 
hammering it on an anvil. The 
hooks are lastly hardened, and after 
being smoothed by turning them 
around quickly in a barrel with 
emery powder and soap, are blued 
by heating them in hot sand. 

Fish-hooks are still made in this 
way by hand in England, but in the 
United States they are now made 
mostly by machines, which do their 
work very fast. 

The word fish-hook is made up of 
fish and hook, Anglo-Saxon hoc , a 
hook. 

FLAG, a piece of light cloth, 
usually of several colors, used by a 
nation as a banner or ensign. In 
common language, the 
words banner, ensign, 
standard, colors, and flag, 
are used generally to mean 
the same thing. Some 
nations, however, have two 
or more flags, and then 
they are used differently. 
For example, Great Britain 
has a flag called the royal 
standard, which is hoisted 
only when the sovereign is 
present, or on great occa¬ 
sions like royal birthdays ; 
a naval ensign, used on ships of war ; 
and a flag, used by the army and on 
merchant ships. In old times flags 
were of all sorts of shapes, square, 
triangular, and long and pointed, 
some with only two points and some 
with many ; but now almost all flags 
are oblong, or a little longer than they 
are wide. There are some excep* 



















FLAG 


243 


FLAG 


tions, as will be seen in the picture 
at the beginning of this book, the 
naval flags of Denmark and of Swe¬ 
den being pointed, and the flag of 
China being shaped like a triangle. 
In old times, too, flags were often of 
only one color, but now all national 
flags are either made up of several 
colors or have something on them, 
such as a cross, a shield, an eagle, 
or stars, to mark them so that they 
can be told from other flags. Flags 
of only one color are now used by 
almost all nations to mean some¬ 
thing : for example, a white flag 
means peace, and is used for a flag of 
truce ; a red flag means defiance, 
and is used by revolutionists, but is 
sometimes used to mean danger and 
is hoisted on men-of-war when pow¬ 
der is being taken on board ; a black 
flag means death, and is used by pi¬ 
rates, and sometimes by soldiers, to 
show that no quarter will be given ; 
and a yellow flag means sickness, 
and is hoisted over hospitals and 
quarantine stations. 

The flag of the United States of 
America is made up of thirteen 
stripes, seven red and six white, so 
that a red stripe comes at both the 
top and bottom, and a blue union, 
sprinkled with as many stars as 
there are States in the Union, in the 
upper corner next to the staff. The 
law does not tell how the stars (of 
which there are now thirty-eight) 
shall be placed, so that in making a 
flag they may be " arranged just as 
one pleases ; but in the flags used 
by the army they are generally made 
into one large star, while in those 
used by the navy they are placed in 
straight lines. The blue union, 
when used separately as a flag, is 
called the union jack. The revenue 
flag of the United States is made up 
of sixteen stripes, eight red and 
eight white, running up and down, 
and a white union in the corner with 
the national arms in blue on it. The 
yacht flag used by all yacht clubs in 
the United States is just like the 
national flag, only the union has in 


it, instead of a star for each State, 
a foul anchor in a circle of thirteen 
stars. 

The national flags of all the other 
principal nations are shown in the 
picture, but some will need to be ex¬ 
plained. The large red cross in the 
naval flag of Great Britain is called the 
cross of St. George. The same cross, 
but smaller, is seen in the union in the 
corner of the flag, where it is shown 
with a white edge, because the cross 
of St. George is properly a red cross 
on a white ground. The other cross 
on the union, running diagonally, or 
from corner to corner, is made up 
of two crosses, the cross of St. An¬ 
drew (for Scotland), which is white 
on a blue ground, and the cross of 
St. Patrick (for Ireland), which is 
red on a white ground ; so that the 
two being put together, the cross 
looks like a double red cross with 
white edges. The royal standard of 
Great Britain is made up of four 
parts, red, yellow, blue, and red, 
with the arms of England, Ireland, 
and Scotland on them. France, 
being now a republic, has no royal 
standard. The German naval flag 
is the same as the imperial stand¬ 
ard. The black eagle in the mid¬ 
dle is the eagle of the German em¬ 
pire, and the small black cross on 
a black, white, and red ground in 
the corner is the cross of Prussia. 
The imperial standard of Russia is 
yellow, with the double-headed 
eagle on it. This eagle was first 
used by the Emperor Constantine 
the Great, the two heads meaning 
the Eastern and Western Roman 
Empires. The Austrian imperial 
standard is also yellow, with the 
double-headed eagle on it, but it 
has a border of different colors 
around it. The royal standard of 
Italy is the same as the national flag, 
shown in the picture. The arms on 
it are those of Savoy. The royal 
standard of Spain is like the naval 
flag. That of Portugal is red, with 
the royal arms on it. The royal 
standards of the Netherlands and 





FLAX 


244 


FLAX 


of Belgium are the same as the 
merchant flags, shown in the pic¬ 
ture, but each has the royal arms on 
the middle bar or stripe. The mer¬ 
chant flag of Denmark is like the 
naval flag, but oblong instead of 
pointed. The merchant flag of 
Sweden is also like the naval flag, 
but without the points, and the mer¬ 
chant flag of Greece is the same as 
the naval flag, only the crown is 
left out. Most of the other countries 
have only one flag. 

The word flag comes from the 
verb flag, meaning to droop, to 
hang down loosely. 

FLAX, fibres or threads from the 
stem of the flax plant, from which 
linen thread and cloth are made. 
There are many kinds of the flax 
plant in different parts of the world. 
The common kind has a straight 
slender stem, two or three feet high, 
branching near the top, and bearing 
beautiful blue flowers. These are 
followed by seed vessels, containing 
slippery brown seed, the LINSEED 
of commerce. The stalks are hol¬ 
low pipes made up of a woody part 
called the boon, and a fibrous rind 
from which the threads used in 
spinning are made. 

When the flax is ripe the plants 
are pulled up by the roots. It is 
then rippled, to separate the seeds 
from the stalks. This is done 
either by hand, by drawing the 
stalks, a handful at a time, through 
a kind of large iron comb, called a 
ripple, which pulls all the seeds off, 
or by machines made for the pur¬ 
pose. The stalks are then retted or 
rotted by soaking them in water, 
which dissolves a kind of vegetable 
glue or sap and thus loosens the 
fibres from the boon. The next 
thing is breaking, by which the fibre 
is separated from the boon. The 
flax brake has a wooden handle, 
which works up and down on a 
board. The under side of the han¬ 
dle and the upper side of the board 
are grooved, those of the handle 
fitting into those of the board, so 


that when the stalks of flax are 
squeezed between them the woody 
part is crushed, but the fibres of 
the bark are not broken. The brake 
is worked by means of a treadle, 
pressed by the foot of the workman. 
The hand brake is much used in 
Russia, Holland, and Belgium, but 
in most other countries the break¬ 
ing is done by steam machinery. 
The boon, or woody part, is now 
separated from the fibre either by 
beating the stalks with a broad flat 
wooden blade called a scutching 
blade, or by a machine called a 
scutching machine. 

The rippling, retting, breaking, 
and scutching of flax are usually 
done near where the flax is raised. 
The fibres are then tied up into bun¬ 
dles and taken to the mills, where 
they are prepared for spinning into 
thread. Flax fibres vary from 
twenty-six to thirty-six inches in 
length. The part next to the root 
is coarse and strong, the middle 
part finer and not quite so strong, 
and the top part still finer and 
weaker. The fibres are therefore 
divided into three lengths, from 
which threads of different fineness 
are made. This is done by a ma¬ 
chine which pulls them apart, in¬ 
stead of cutting them, as this makes 
them better for spinning. The next 
thing is hackling or heckling. The 
hackle is an iron comb, with sharp 
teeth, through which the workman 
draws the flax by handfuls. This 
combs the threads straight and takes 
out all the coarse and broken ones, 
which are called TOW. Hackling is 
now done by machinery in most of 
the large mills. 

The hackled flax, which is called 
line, is now sorted or separated by 
hand, the different thicknesses 
being put into separate places in a 
sorting box. The sorted fibres are 
next spread in rows upon a long 
cloth, called a feeding cloth, one 
row partly overlapping the next one, 
and passed between heavy iron roll¬ 
ers, which make them longer and 






FLEA 


245 


FLEA 


press them flat. After this, which is 
called spreading, the flax fibres are 
taken in tin cans to the drawing 
frame, in which the fibres are joined 
together at the ends, and made into 
one length. Lastly, they go to the 
roving frame, where they are twisted 
slightly, and wound upon BOBBINS 
ready for spinning into thread. 

The word flax is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fleax , flax, from feax , the 
hair. 

FLEA. The shape of the common 
flea is shown in the picture, which 
is magnified many times larger than 
life. Its color is a reddish brown. 
Its back is covered with horny 
scales, which lap over each other 
like shingles, and which are so 
strong that much pressure is needed 
to crush them. 



Flea. 


The head is small for the body, 
and has two small feelers, which the 
flea always shakes when it is mov¬ 
ing, but which it keeps quiet, as in 
the picture, when it is at rest. The 
beak with which it pierces the skin 
is a kind of sheath, having inside it 
a tube, and carrying two long sharp 
lancets, with edges like saw teeth. 
With these the flea cuts the skin, 
and it then sucks the blood through 
the tube. 

Like other insects the flea has six 
legs. The two hindmost ones are 
very long and strong, so that it is 
able to make great leaps, some¬ 
times two hundred times the length 
of its own body. If a lion could 
jump as well, it would go two-thirds 
of a mile at each leap. The flea will 
also jump as high as two hundred 
times its own length, and its 
strength is very great. Some won¬ 


derful exhibitions have been made 
with “learned fleas,” which were 
taught to draw a little cannon and a 
carriage, and to do many tricks. The 
cannon was made of gold and had 
all the parts of a real cannon. It 
was placed on a plate of glass, and 
two flea horses were harnessed to 
it by a gold chain, which was fast¬ 
ened to the thighs of their hinder 
legs. Two other fleas drew a little 
gold carriage with four wheels, and 
a third one sat on the coach-box and 
held a splinter of wood for a whip. 
The cannon and the carriage were 
each much heavier than the fleas, 
yet they drew them with ease. 
Thirty other fleas were taught to go 
through a military exercise, standing 
on their hind legs, and holding up 
little splinters of wood for guns. All 
these fleas knew their master and 
did what he ordered them to do. 
Sometimes they got lazy and would 
not act, but they were at once waked 
up when their master waved a burn¬ 
ing coal near them, so that they felt 
the heat. They were fed by being 
put on a man’s arm, which they 
sucked. 

The flea lays ten or twelve white 
oval eggs, dropping them between 
the boards of floors, in the cracks 
of old furniture, or among dirty 
clothes. She puts with them some 
little black grains of dried blood for 
the young to feed upon when born. 
In four or five days tiny white lar- 
vag or worms come out of the eggs, 
but they afterward turn red, and in 
about a fortnight each one spins a 
silky cocoon around itself, and in 
this it turns into a pupa (see In¬ 
sect). In another fortnight each 
pupa turns into a flea. 

There are several kinds of fleas, 
some of which live on the blood of 
man, while others are found mostly 
on animals such as the dog, cat, fox, 
and squirrel, each of which has its 
own kind of flea, but they are all 
much alike in looks. Dogs troubled 
with fleas should be washed in strong 
soap-suds, weak tobacco water, 




<r 


FLINT 246 FLOUR 


petroleum water, or carbolic acid 
and water every few days until they 
are driven off. If this does not do, 
rub in “ Persian insect powder” all 
over the skin. The dog should be 
washed soon after using this. 

The flea belongs to the order 
diptera , or two-winged INSECTS. 

The word flea is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fled , flea. 

FLINT, a kind of quartz rock. It 
is usually of a dark bluish color, but 
is sometimes light brown, yellow, 
or nearly white. It is found gen¬ 
erally wherever there is chalk. Flint 
may be easily split into pieces with 
a very sharp edge, for which reason 
it was much prized by the Indians, 
who made their knives, axes, and 
spear and arrow heads out of it. 
Before lucifer matches were known, 
a piece of flint and steel were used 
to strike fire with, the sparks being 
caught in tinder and blown into a 
blaze. In old times also all kinds 
of guns and pistols had flint locks, 
made of a flint fastened tightly in 
the hammer and a piece of steel on 
which it struck fire when the trigger 
was pulled. The sparks were caught 
in some gunpowder in a little hollow 
iron pan on the side of the gun bar¬ 
rel, into which the touch-hole 
opened, and the powder inside the 
barrel was thus fired. 

Flint is used to some extent in the 
manufacture of porcelain, being 
first burned, then thrown into cold 
water, which cracks it into small 
pieces, and afterward ground to 
powder. It was once largely em¬ 
ployed in making flint glass, which 
took its name from it, but sand has 
now taken its place. 

The word flint is Anglo-Saxon. 

FLOUR, the finely ground meal 
of wheat of other grain. The good¬ 
ness of wheat flour depends much 
on the kind of wheat used and much 
on the way in which it is ground. In 
making it millers usually mix to¬ 
gether different kinds of wheat, so 
that all the flour may be alike. The 
machinery of flour mills is usually 


run by water, but sometimes by 
steam-power. The grain is cleaned 
before grinding by passing it through 
machines where a blast of air 
blows out all the dust and chaff. It 
is then run into funnel-shaped boxes 
called hoppers, from the bottom of 
which it drops little by little be¬ 
tween the grinding stones, the upper 
one of which turns round on the 
lower one. These have sharp-edged 
grooves cut in them, and the grain 
is ground to powder between them. 
The stones are boxed in to keep the 
flour from being wasted, and a blast 
of air which blows between them 
takes out the flour as fast as it is 
ground and keeps the stones from 
getting too hot. 

After grinding, the flour goes to 
the dressing or bolting machine. 
This is a long kind of barrel, covered 
on the outside sometimes with wire 
gauze and sometimes with silk gauze. 
One end of it is lower than the 
other, and its gauze cover, which 
is very fine at the higher end, grows 
coarser and coarser towards the 
lower end. The bolt is made to turn 
round very fast, so that when the 
flour goes into it, it passes little by 
little down to the lower end, sifting 
through the gauze as it goes, the 
finest through the top and the coars¬ 
er kinds further down, each falling 
into boxes made for it, until at the 
lower end nothing but the bran is 
left. The flour is then put into 
sacks or barrels for market. The 
finest flour is called the best, but as 
it is almost all starch it is not quite 
so good for food as that which has in 
it some of all parts of the grain. The 
best flour now made is called “ new 
process flour,” because it is made in 
a new way. Vienna bread is made 
of it. Graham flour is made of the 
whole grain ground fine, and, if well 
made, is better than the finest and 
whitest flour, but what is often sold 
for Graham flour is only the bran 
ground over again. 

Flour is also made from other 
grains than wheat, such as rye, bar- 




FLOWERS 


247 


FLOWERS 


ley, rice, oats, and corn, but no flour 
is so good for food as that from 
wheat. Bread made from rye and 
barley flour is dark colored, and 
usually heavy and coarse. The flour 
of oats and corn is commonly called 
meal. In some countries flour is 
sometimes made out of potatoes, 
peas, acorns, and chestnuts, and in 
Sweden and Norway out of a kind 
of white or cream-colored powder 
called berg-mehl (German berg , 
mountain, and mehl , meal) or moun¬ 
tain flour, so called because it is 
found upon the mountains. It is 
nothing but the powder of little shells 
which perhaps have been lying there 
for thousands of years. This shell 
flour is mixed with grain flour in 
times of scarcity, and helps to make 
the loaves of bread larger. The Lap¬ 
landers, Icelanders, and other people 
in the far north grind up reindeer 
moss and mix it with their flour. 

Flour is so called because it is the 
flower or best part of the grain. 

FLOWERS. In the article Plant, 
which should be read before this, is 
told how the sap, which rises up 
from the roots through the stem, 
causes the plant to grow. This 
same sap, which forms buds and 
green leaves, makes flower buds also 
and the many colored flowers which 
grow out of them. We do not know 
exactly how all these different colors 
are made. The stems and the buds 
of flowers are generally green, and 
the sap in them looks just like the 
sap in any other part of the plant, 
but for some reason when the bud 
bursts into bloom the flower is very 
different in color from the leaves. 
In some plants there are many col¬ 
ors in the same flower : for instance, 
the tulip is often striped and varie¬ 
gated, and the pansy, the petunia, 
and the China pink have several col¬ 
ors side by side. The light probably 
has much to do with making the 
colors of flowers, for they usually 
change some as they open. The 
flower of the COTTON plant changes 
much after opening, and the flower 


of a vine called the cobea changes 
from pale green to bright purple. 

Flowers are very interesting to us. 
We admire them for their shape, 
their colors, and their smell ; they 
give us, too, many useful things, 
such as perfumes, honey, and medi¬ 
cines, and many small animals, such 
as bees, butterflies, and humming¬ 
birds, get much of their food from 
them. But we must not forget that 
the principal use of the flower is to 
form the fruit and the seed, and 
thus to make new plants. To un¬ 
derstand then how a plant makes 
fruit and seeds it is necessary first to 
know all about its flower. Different 
kinds of plants have different kinds 



Fig. 1 —Flower of Morning Glory. 
a, Corolla; b, Calyx. 

of flowers, but all are alike in some 
things. Some flowers are perfect 
and some are imperfect, or wanting 
in some of the parts of a perfect 
flower. We will take a morning 
glory as an example of a perfect 
flower, in which the parts may easily 
be seen. It is made up of outside 
flower leaves and of an inside part, 
which is shut in by the flower leaves. 
The flower leaves are of two kinds, 
the upper part, of some other color 
than green, and a little cup-like part, 
in which the upper part sits, and 
which is usually green and leaf-like. 
In the picture these are shown apart. 
The upper part, a, Fig. 1, is called 
the corolla (Latin, a small crown), 






FLOWERS 


248 


FLOWERS 


and it is the most showy part of the 
flower ; the lower part, b , is called 
the calyx (Latin, flower-cup), be¬ 
cause it is the cup in which the true 
flower sits. 

In the second picture, Fig. 2, the 
corolla is shown split down and 
spread open so that the inside can be 



Fig. 2.—Flower of Morning Glory. 

Corolla cut and spread open. 

seen. The five little upright things 
are callen stamens (Latin, stamen , 
the standing thing, from stare , to 
stand), because they stand up inside 
the corolla. A stamen is made up 
of two parts, a stalk called the fila¬ 
ment (Latin, filum, a thread), and a 
little hollow thing on its top 
called the anther (Greek, 
ant her os, flowery), which is 
filled with a powdery mat¬ 
ter called pollen (Latin, fine 
flour). Inside the stamens, 
and surrounded by them, is 
the pistil (Latin, pistilium, 
a pestle), so called because 
it is shaped like a pestle. 
The morning glory has but 
one pistil, shown in Fig. 3, 
where it is enlarged so that 
the parts can easily be seen, 
but some flowers, as the 
Fig- 3 - rose and the buttercup, 
Pistil of have a great many. The 
M (31oi- nS pistil has three parts : the 
Flower— roun d part a * the bottom, 
enlarged, which is fastened to the 
stem, is the ovary (Latin, 
ovum , an egg), so called because it 
holds the seeds or eggs of the plant; 



this grows above into a slender stem 
called the style (Latin, stylus , a 
stake), which bears on its top a 
roughish head called the stigma 
(Greek, a mark made by a sharp in¬ 
strument). Upon this stigma, which 
is moist and a little sticky, some of 
the pollen from the anthers on the 
ends of the stamens is sure to fall 
when the wind blows, and stick fast 
to it, and this causes the seeds in the 
ovary to ripen. We do not know 
exactly why this is, but we do know 
that if some of the pollen of a flower 
does not fall ofi its pistil, its seeds 
will be useless, that is, they will 
not grow if planted. The pollen is 
often carried to stigmas by humming 
birds and by bees and other insects. 
It is said that this is done to the flow¬ 
ers of white clover by humble bees, 
and that the white clover planted in 
New Zealand would not bear any 
seeds until humble bees had been car¬ 
ried there from England. 

The calyx, corolla, stamens, and 
pistils make up all the parts of a 
flower, but in many flowers the parts 
differ much. In the morning glory 
the calyx is made up of five separate 
leaves, which can be pulled off one 
at a time. Each one of these leaves 
is called a sepal. But in some flowers 
all the sepals are so grown together 
that if one be pulled the whole calyx 
will come off. The corolla of the 
morning glory is formed of one 
piece, but in most flowers the corolla 
is made up of several pieces, each 
one of which is called a petal. The 
corolla of the rose has many petals. 
Some corollas have the petals of 
the same shape and of equal size, as 
in the strawberry, but some are irreg¬ 
ular and have curious forms, some 
being like bells, trumpets, wheels, 
stars, etc., and some looking much 
like insects, such as butterflies, bees, 
and spiders. The stamens and the 
pistils too of plants differ much both 
in shape and in number; and some 
plants, like the snowball, have 
neither stamens nor pistil, and of 
course can bear no fruit. 









FLOWERS 


249 


FLUTE 


Many flowers do not have all the 
parts. The lily has no calyx, and the 
mignonette no corolla. In some the 
stamens are found in one flower and 
the pistil in another, both on the 
same plant, as in Indian corn ; and 
in others the stamen-bearing flowers 
are on one plant, and the pistil-bear¬ 
ing flowers on another, as in the red 
maple. Where the stamens and the 
pistil are separated the pollen is car¬ 
ried to the stigma sometimes by the 
wind and sometimes by insects. 
Bees and humble bees get pollen on 
their legs and bodies when they are 
seeking for honey, and thus carry it 
to the pistil-bearing plants. Pollen 
is sometimes carried by the wind hun¬ 
dreds of miles. 

After a flower has blossomed, the 
corolla, the stamens, and generally 
the calyx, fall off or wither away ; 
but the ovary of the pistil remains, 
grows larger, and in time becomes 
the FRUIT. 

Flowers have different habits, as 
well as colors and shapes. In most 
plants the flowers bloom at all hours 
of the day, and when opened stay 
open, even during night, till they 
fade ; but some, like the tulip, the 
pond lily, the sunflower, the dande¬ 
lion, and the mountain daisy, shut 
themselves up at night and open 
again in the morning. The dandelion 
also shuts itself up often in the day¬ 
time when the sun is very hot. The 
flowers of the salsify or oyster plant, 
which look much like those of the 
dandelion, close at noon and open 
again in the morning. Another 
flower, commonly called “ go-to-bed- 
at-noon,” acts in the same way. 
The flower called “four-o’clock” 
opens about four in the afternoon, 
and the evening primrose at evening. 
Some flowers open only at night. 
The night blooming cereus blooms 
for only a few hours and then wilts 
and dies before morning. The beau¬ 
tiful scarlet flower of the cypress 
vine too lasts but a few hours, open¬ 
ing in the morning and closing for¬ 
ever in the afternoon, but a new set 


of blossoms appear each morning. 
The habits of the morning glory are 
the same as those of the cypress 
vine. Spring flowers are generally 
small and delicate, but sweet. The 
flowers of summer are larger and 
more plentiful and have brighter 
colors ; they are also very sweet and 
load the air with odor. The flowers 
of autumn are bright and showy, but 
have little fragrance. 

The smell of some flowers is very 
sweet, of others very unpleasant. 
In some the smell is the same all the 
time the flower is open, but others 
give out odor only at night. The 
hyacinth smells sweet all the time, 
but about eleven o’clock at night its 
odor becomes so strong as to fill the 
room with fragrance. A few flowers 
are eaten and a few used in dyeing ; 
but their chief use is in making PER¬ 
FUMES. 

The word flower is from the Latin 
jlos, fioris , a flower. 

FLUTE, a wind musical instrument 
much used in orchestras and 
bands. The flutes of the ancient 
Egyptians were like those of the pres¬ 
ent day, but those of the Greeks and 
Romans were played by blowing in 
the end, like the modern CLARINET. 
This kind of a flute was played until 
the last century, and was called the 
English flute. It was finally given up 
for the German flute, which is the 
one most in use now. The Boehm 
flute is named from Theobald 
Boehm, flutist to the King of Bava¬ 
ria, who made the first one about 
1833. It is much like the German 
flute, but has more and different 
keys, which make it more per¬ 
fect in tone. The piccolo is a 
small flute, whose notes are higher 
than those of the common flute. 
It is very shrill, and is used only 
in large orchestras or military 
bands. 

The word flute is made from the 
Latin fiuta , the name of an eel 
caught around the island of Sicily, 
whose side is marked with spots like 
flute holes. 





FLY 


250 


FLY 


FLY. There are many thousand 
kinds of flies, which are all alike in 
having only two wings, the two little 
threads with knobs on the end behind 
the wings, called balancers, taking 
the place of a second pair, and a 
horny or fleshy proboscis, or long 
tongue, with which they lick up their 
food. 

The common house fly is found 
wherever man is. It comes with the 
warm weather and stays until killed 
by the cold ; but some are saved 
during the winter in warm places, 
and from these are raised the swarms 
which fill our houses in summer. 
Flies are usually most numerous 
around stables, because their early 
days are passed in dung. The females 
lay their eggs in it, and the larvae, or 
little worms hatched from them, 
which are called maggots, grow up 
in it until they turn into flies. The 
maggots are little white thin-skinned 
worms, without any feet. They 
change into pupae (see Insect) with¬ 
out casting off their skins, and in 
eight to fourteen days afterward 
come out of the pupa shell perfect 
flies. 

All house flies are of the same size ; 
the very small ones and the very large 
ones which we often see about the 
house belong to other kinds. Among 
the smaller kinds are the cheese fly, 
which lays its eggs in cheese and 
makes the maggots which live in it. 
The blue-bottle fly, which is one of 
the large kinds, lays its eggs in 
meat, and therefore is found mostly 
around slaughter houses and butcher 
shops. 

The common fly is a very interest¬ 
ing thing when looked at under the 
MICROSCOPE. The wings are so 
thin and delicate that one can see 
through them, and are divided by 
little veins. The eyes are on the 
top of the head, and each one is 
made up of 4000 very small six-sided 
eyes set closely together. The pro¬ 
boscis or tongue is a wonderful in¬ 
strument. It is between the an- 
tennce ', or two little horns which stick 


out in front and which serve as feel¬ 
ers, and is bent up underneath the 
head when at rest. When the fly 
lights on a lump of sugar, it un¬ 
bends its tongue and stretches it out, 
and the broad knob-like end sepa¬ 
rates into two flat leaves, with which 
it laps up the sweets. These leaves, 
which are shown in the picture, are 
strong muscles, and have little hairs 
on them, which make 
them rough like a 
rasp. It is these 
which cause the ting¬ 
ling feeling in our 
skin when a fly lights 
on the hand or face 
to sip the perspira¬ 
tion. There has been 
much dispute as to 
the reason why flies 
and many other in¬ 
sects are able to walk 
up smooth surfaces like window- 
panes and on ceilings with the heads 
downward, as the soles of the feet 
are closely set with bristles. It is 
now thought that a little disk at 
the end of each hair acts like a 
sucker (see Air), a thin liquid which 
comes from the bottom of the feet 
making them air-tight, and that the 
pressure of the air on the outside 
keeps the fly from falling. 

The Tsetse Fiy, of Africa, is not 
much larger than the house fly, but 
it is such a pest that it keeps a large 
part of that country from being vis¬ 
ited. This fly does no harm to man, 
the mule, the ass, the pig, the goat, 
or to wild animals, but its sting is 
sure death to the horse, the ox, the 
sheep, and the dog. These flies live 
only in certain places, and when 
herds of cattle are driven through 
the parts where they are, the cattle 
have to be smeared over with dung 
mixed with milk, which the tsetse dis¬ 
likes, and they travel only by night. 

The fly belongs to the order 
diptera , or two-winged INSECTS. 

The word fly is from the Anglo- 
Saxon pledge , a flying insect, from 
Jledgan, to fly. 



End of Fly’s 
Tongue. 











FLYING SQUIRREL 


251 


FOIL 


FLYING SQUIRREL. This ani¬ 
mal is much like other squirrels both 
in looks and in habits, but has a kind 
of skin so stretched between the fore 
and hind feet, that in leaping from 
one tree to another it is kept up as if 
it had wings. The flying squirrel 
does not really fly, but sails from 
one tree to another, being kept up by 
its skin just as a man is held up in 
the air by a parachute (see Bal¬ 
loon), and steered by it as by a rud¬ 
der. When it wishes to go from one 
tree to another, it runs quickly up to 
the top of the first and springs off, 
at the same time spreading its legs 
out wide so as to stretch the skin be¬ 
tween them, and sails downward, 
sometimes going more than twice as 
far as the height of a four-story 
house. When it comes near the 
next tree and wishes to alight, it 
turns upward, and the force with 
which it is going carries it up again 
about a third as far as it came down 
until it catches on the limb it wants. 
It then runs up to the top of that tree 
and leaps off in the same way, and 
thus travels through woods very 
quickly. It is seldom seen in the day¬ 
time, but usually comes out at sunset 
and leaps playfully from tree to tree 
far into the night. 

The flying squirrel is found all 
through the Eastern United States, 
from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. 
It is eight or ten inches long, and is 
yellowish brown above and white 
below. It builds its nest in the hol¬ 
lows and crotches of trees, and has 
four to six young, usually in May. 
Sometimes six or seven live together 
in the same nest, and many more 
than that are sometimes found in the 
same hollow of a tree. It lives 
chiefly on nuts, grains, and seeds, 
but eats also young birds and 
eggs. 

The flying squirrel may easily be 
tamed, and it makes a gentle and 
pretty pet, allowing itself to be car¬ 
ried around in its master’s pocket ; 
but as it is lively only at night, it is 
not so interesting as the gray squir¬ 


rel. It may be treated and fed in 
the same way as other squirrels. 

The flying squirrel is a mammal 
of the order rodentia , or gnawing 
animals, and of the squirrel 
family. 

FOG, a body of watery vapor in 
the air, differing from CLOUDS only 
in being nearer the earth. It is 
caused by the union of a body of 
cool air with another body which is 
warm and damp. Clouds are formed 
when this happens high up in the 
air, and fog when it takes place near 
the earth. Fogs are also formed 
when streams of warm damp air 
blow over bodies of colder water or 
earth. All real fogs are damp ; the 
haze, or dry fog, as it is sometimes 
called, often seen in Indian sum¬ 
mer, is not a fog, but only the smoke 
of great prairie or forest fires driven 
from the west by the winds. Mist 
is something between fog and rain. 

The word fog is probably from 
the Danish fog, driving snow. 

FOIL, a thin leaf of metal, thicker 
than leaf metal, such as gold leaf and 
silver leaf, and thinner than sheet 
metal. There are two kinds of foil, 
tin foil, which is used for silvering 
the backs of MIRRORS, lining tea 
caddies and other boxes, wrapping 
up tobacco, coating Leyden jars 
(see Electricity), covering the 
roller of the phonograph, and 
many other things ; and the bright 
foils of different colors used by jew¬ 
ellers to put under real or false gems 
for adding to their brightness, and 
by actors as tinsel for their dresses, 
crowns, etc. 

Tin Foil is sometimes made by 
rolling out blocks of pure tin to the 
right thickness in powerful machines, 
and sometimes by making the tin 
into a roller and turning it round 
slowly against a knife which shaves 
off a thin sheet all round it. 

Jewellers’ Foil is made of sheets 
of silvered copper rolled very thin, 
and colored of the right colors to suit 
the gems under which it is to go, as 
blue for sapphires, lake or carmine 




FOOD 


252 


FOOD 


for rubies, green for emeralds, etc. 
After the colors are put on, the foil 
is varnished and highly polished. 
Much of this kind of foil is used in 
making toys, and for covering cards 
on which pearl buttons are sewed to 
be sold. 

The word foil is from the Latin 
folium , a leaf. 

FOOD. The human body is all 
the time changing in some way. 
Every action of the MUSCLES, every 
beat of the heart, every breath that 
is drawn, weakens some part of the 
body and wears away some of the 
strength. A very short time there¬ 
fore would be needed to wear out 
the body if there were not some 
means to build up all that is wasted. 
This is found in the food and drink 
which we take daily. As the differ¬ 
ent parts of the body are made up 
of different ELEMENTS, a variety of 
food is needed to supply them. 
Some kinds nourish the blood, some 
strengthen the muscles, and some 
build up the bone. Man cannot live 
on one kind of food alone, but must 
have all of several classes of food, 
mixed together in the right propor¬ 
tions. 

Water and Salts. Of these classes 
of food, in which drink is included, 
water and the mineral salts are im¬ 
portant. The human body is made 
up of about three fourths water and 
one fourth solid matter. A great 
deal of this water is all the while 
passing off through the pores of the 
skin and in other ways, and has ^to 
be made up through the food and 
drink. We take in more water with 
our food than with our drink, for all 
animal and vegetable food is largely 
made up of water. Of the mineral 
salts in our food, chloride of sodium, 
or common salt, which is needed by 
the blood, and phosphate of lime, 
which builds up the bones, are the 
most useful; but there are also some 
others, called alkaline salts, which 
are needed for our health. 

Starch and Sugar. Another im¬ 
portant class is made up of starch 


and SUGAR, which are so nearly 
alike that the one may be easily 
turned into the other. We get these 
from vegetables mostly, though milk 
has in it a little sugar. All the cere¬ 
als, or grains used for food, potatoes, 
peas, and beans, give us starch, and 
we get sugar not only from cane 
juice, but from all the sweet juices 
of fruits and vegetables. We could 
not live without this kind of food. 
Those who have to live on animal 
food without fresh vegetables are 
often attacked by scurvy and other 
diseases. Starch and sugar are 
called carbonaceous foods, because 
they are made up principally of CAR¬ 
BON. 

Fats. Another class of foods are 
the fats, which also are called car¬ 
bonaceous foods. They are made 
up, like starch and sugar, of carbon, 
hydrogen, and oxygen, but mixed 
together in different proportions. 
We get fat from both animals and 
vegetables. Olives and most kinds 
of nuts have in them a good deal of 
oil or fat. Indian corn, wheat, and 
other grains also contain some. But¬ 
ter is the fat of milk ; and at least a 
quarter of the yolk of eggs is oily fat. 

Albumens. The last class of foods 
are the albuminoid substances, so 
called because albumen is the prin¬ 
cipal one of them. They are also 
called nitrogenous substances, be¬ 
cause, while they have in them car¬ 
bon, HYDROGEN, and OXYGEN, like 
starch, sugar, and fat, they have also 
NITROGEN, which the others have 
not. This is an important differ¬ 
ence, for without nitrogen men and 
animals could not live. We are 
all the while taking in nitrogen with 
our breath, but not any of it stays in 
the body ; it is all breathed out just 
as it went it. The nitrogen which 
goes into the blood, and which helps 
to build up our wasted strength, is 
taken in with the food. The princi¬ 
pal nitrogenous foods are albumen, 
which forms the white of egg and 
makes up a large part of the lean of 
all meats ; caseine, which is found 





FORGE 


253 


FORK 


in milk, and is the chief part of 
CHEESE; legumine, which is a kind 
of vegetable caseine, found in beans, 
peas, and other pod vegetables ; and 
GLUTEN, which is in all grains used 
for food. 

The milk on which infants are fed 
is made up of water, mineral salts, 
sugar, fat, and caseine. It therefore 
has in it all things needed to sustain 
life, and this is why children thrive 
on it. As man grows older he needs 
all these things just as much as he 
did in infancy, and unless he is care¬ 
ful to supply himself with the differ¬ 
ent kinds of food, he cannot keep 
up his health and strength. 

The word food is from the Anglo- 
Saxon foda , nourishment. 

FORGE. The hammering of 
red-hot iron or steel into shape is 



Blacksmith’s Forge. 


called forging, and the workshop in 
which it is done is called a forge. 
The most common forge is that used 
by blacksmiths, shown in the pic¬ 
ture. It is made up of a broad stone 
hearth, raised about as high as a 
table, in front of the chimney, on 
which the fire is kept burning all the 
time. When not in use, the fire is 
usually kept covered up with ashes, 
but it can easily be made bright by 
raking it open, and blowing the 


great leather bellows, seen behind 
the chimney. The curved handle of 
the bellows is above the anvil. When 
the blacksmith works this handle up 
and down, a blast of air is blown 
through a pipe which leads from the 
bellows through the chimney, and 
as this carries a great deal of oxy¬ 
gen into the fire, it blazes up and 
becomes hot enough to heat metals 
very quickly. The iron hood over the 
fire catches sparks and smoke and 
carries them up the chimney. In 
front of the hearth is an iron trough 
full of water, in which the smith 
cools hot iron, and thus hardens it. 
At the right of it stands the ANVIL, 
on which he hammers and shapes 
things, and hammers, sledges, and 
other tools used by him are seen ly¬ 
ing around. 

In forges where shovels, spades, 
axes, scythes, and other tools are 
made, bellows worked by steam- 
power are used, and the iron or steel 
is generally hammered with tilt 
HAMMERS instead of by hand. 
There are also very large forges, 
where great masses of metal, such as 
the shafts of steamships and other 
parts of machines, are forged under 
great steam hammers which crush 
the red-hot metal into shape. In 
such forges the metal has to be 
moved from the fire to the anvils 
by means of CRANES. Portable 
forges are small forges which may 
be moved from place to place. They 
are much used in ship building, 
boiler making, and by armies in the 
field for mending iron work, such as 
the parts of wagons, cannon,^ etc. 

The word forge is from the Latin 
fabric a, the workshop of a faber , 
or smith. 

FORK. The ancients had no 
forks, but ate with their fingers, 
holding their meat with the left 
hand while they cut it with a knife 
in their right. Forks first came into 
use in Italy about the fifteenth cen¬ 
tury, but they were not generally 
adopted until about two hundred 
years ago. 













FOUNTAIN 


254 


FOWLS 


The word fork is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fore , Italian forca, Latin 
furca , fork. 

FOUNTAIN. Water may be made 
to jet or spout up above the natural 
level of the ground in three ways : 
1, by having the fountain joined by 
pipes with a reservoir of water which 
is higher than itself; 2, by pumping 
up the water ; and 3, by using some 
natural spring. Fountains working 
on the first plan are the most com¬ 
mon. The height to which they will 
throw their water depends on the 
height of the reservoir which feeds 
them, for as water always seeks 
its level, that which spouts from 
the pipe of the fountain will try to 
get up as high as that in the reser¬ 
voir. If the pipe reached up higher 
than the water in the reservoir, the 
water in it would go just as high as 
that in the reservoir ; but as the 
pipe is usually much shorter, the 
water can only leap up part of the 
way, when the force by which all 
things are drawn toward the earth 
pulls it back again and it falls into 
the basin and runs off through the 
drains under the fountain. 

The height to which water may 
be thrown by the second kind of 
fountain depends on the power of 
the pump beneath, which is usually 
worked by a steam-engine. The 
third kind of fountain is generally 
seen at mineral spas or springs, 
where the natural force of the spring 
is used to throw up the water. The 
drinkng fountains in the parks and 
streets of cities are supplied from 
the same water pipes which carry 
water into houses. 

The word fountain is from the 
Latin fons,fontis , a fountain. 

FOWLS. The word fowl properly 
means any kind of bird, but in com¬ 
mon language it is given to poul¬ 
try, or any barnyard bird, such as 
cocks and hens, turkeys, ducks, 
geese, swans, and pigeons. In this 
article it will be understood to mean 
only cocks and hens, all the other 
kinds of fowls being told about 


under their own names. It is sup¬ 
posed that common fowls came first 
from India or from some of the 
islands of Asia, where many wild 
kinds are still found, but our tame 
fowls are not exactly like any of the 
wild kinds. Fowls have been kept 
in almost all countries from the most 
ancient times, and there are now 
many different breeds. Besides the 
common dunghill fowl, the princi¬ 
pal kinds are the Game, Dorking, 
Poland, Black Spanish, Chinese and 
Malay, Hamburg, Dominique, and 
Bantam. 

Dunghill or common barnyard 
fowls are supposed to be a mixture 
of many breeds. They are of many 
different colors, sizes, and shapes. 
The cocks usually have very large 
combs and wattles. Some have yel¬ 
low legs and some black legs, but 
the yellow-legged ones are the best. 
Many people think that these com¬ 
mon fowls are as good for laying 
and for eating as any of the other 
kinds. 

Game fowls are much like common 
ones in form, but are generally a 
little smaller, and have more delicate 
legs ; they are also stronger and 
have more courage. The cocks are 
very quarrelsome, and will fight 
until they die. On this account they 
are much used for the wicked sport 
of cock-fighting, which is a favorite 
amusement in the East Indies and 
in Spanish America, and which is 
sometimes practised secretly in this 
country, although it is against the 
law. In these fights the combs and 
wattles of the cocks are cut off close 
to the head, so that in pecking at 
each other there shall be little to 
catch hold of, and long steel spurs, 
called gaffs, are put on over the 
cocks’ spurs, so sharp that bad 
wounds are made when the birds 
strike each other. But game fowls 
are good for other things than 
fighting. They are strong and sel¬ 
dom sick, and their flesh is solid and 
much liked for the table. The hens 
I lay rather small eggs, but they are 





FOWLS 


255 


FOWLS 


good sitters, and take the best of care 
of their chickens. 

Dorking fowls were first raised in 
the town of Dorking, in Surrey, 
England. They are of large size, 
good shape, and when of pure blood 
are white, but many are now seen 
speckled with black or gray. They 
always have five toes on each foot, 
instead of four like most other fowls. 
Sometimes the cocks have double 
combs. Dorkings are good layers, 
their flesh is white and tender, and 
they are easily fattened. 

Poland fowls, supposed to have 
been first brought from Poland, are 
black, and have, instead of a comb, 
a crest of feathers on the head which 
is sometimes so large as to hang 
over their eyes. There are also other 
kinds called Polands, such as white 
Polands, which are white with black 
topknots, and golden Polands, which 
are mixed yellow and black with 
black topknots, but the real Polands 
are black with white topknots. 
They are very handsome fowls, and 
fine layers, but they do not like to 
sit, and it is always best to have their 
eggs hatched by other hens. They 
are easily fattened, and their flesh is 
good. Poland fowls are much raised 
in France and Egypt. 

Black Spanish fowls were first 
brought from Spain. They are 
sometimes called Fayal fowls, be¬ 
cause many are raised in that island. 
They are quite large, with black 
feathers, which are very dark on the 
lower parts, and have lead-colored 
feet and legs. Their combs are very 
large and often hang over on one 
side, and they have a white patch of 
naked skin behind the ears. They 
are fine layers, laying larger eggs 
than the Polands, and their flesh is 
excellent for the table. 

Chinese and Malay fowls include 
Shanghais, Cochin Chinas, Chit- 
tagongs, and Brahmapootras. The 
Shanghais, which came from China, 
are much like the Cochin Chinas, 
which were brought from the coun¬ 
try of the same name. They are 


much larger than common fowls, 
and are awkward in shape, having 
long bony legs and short, wings and 
tail. Some are yellow or cinnamon 
colored, some black, and some 
white, and while some have feath¬ 
ers on their legs others are bare¬ 
legged. The Cochin Chinas are 
usually reddish brown. Both these 
kinds are hardy and easy to raise, 
and good layers and sitters. Their 
eggs are light brown or buff. The 
Chittagongs or Malays were first 
brought to this country from Ma¬ 
lacca, but they probably get their 
name from Chittagong in India, 
They are quite large, with heavy 
feathered legs, and they are usually 
brown streaked with yellow or white. 
They are good layers and their eggs 
are very large. Their chickens are 
easily raised. The Brahmapootras, 
named from the river Brahmapoo¬ 
tra, in India, are large gray fowls, 
and are thought by some to be part 
Shanghai and part Chittagong. 
They are fine layers, lay very large 
eggs, and are good sitters and 
mothers. 

Hamburg fowls, sometimes called 
Bolton Grays, are very pretty fowls, 
silvery-white speckled with black, 
and are much valued both for their 
flesh and eggs. Dominique fowls 
are also speckled. They are rather 
small, but they are good layers and 
their flesh is good. 

Bantam fowls are named from the 
town of Bantam in Java, but they 
were first brought from India. They 
are very small, usually weighing 
only about a pound apiece, but they 
are very courageous. A bantam 
cock will whip a dunghill cock of 
five times its own weight. There 
are a good many kinds, most of 
them having feathered legs. The 
Seabright bantam is a beautiful bird 
of mixed colors, with smooth legs, 
first raised by Sir John Seabright. 
There is a kind which has a top- 
knot, like the Polands, and another 
which is not larger than a pigeon. 

' Bantams make very pretty pets, and 





FOWLS 


256 


FOWLS 


they lay well, but their eggs are quite 
small. 

Besides these, there are many 
fancy kinds of fowls, which are kept 
chiefly as curiosities. Among them 
are the creepers, with very short 
legs ; the Persian or rumpless fowls, 
without tails ; the Friesland, friz¬ 
zled, or crisped fowls, with feathers 
turned toward their heads ; the silky 
or merino fowls, covered with a kind 
of down instead of feathers ; and 
the negro, with black comb, wat¬ 
tles, legs, and feathers. 

Laying. Fowls lay more eggs 
than any other kind of birds. Chick¬ 
ens usually begin to lay the next 
spring after they are hatched. When 
a hen begins to think about laying, 
her comb and wattles grow red, and 
she cackles often. She then looks 
for a nest, and after she has found 
one to suit, generally in some quiet 
place where she can hide herself, 
she makes a little hollow in it and 
soon begins to lay. Some hens will 
lay an egg every day and some one 
every other day. Eggs ought to be 
taken out of the nest every after¬ 
noon, for if left for several days the 
heat of the hen’s body warms them 
every time she goes to lay, and they 
will not keep so long. 

Sitting. After laying fifteen or 
twenty eggs a hen begins to flutter 
about with her feathers ruffled up, 
and clucking as if she had chick¬ 
ens. This shows that she wants to 
sit, and if a nest be made for her 
and eggs put into it, she will stop 
laying, go on to it and sit ; but if 
her eggs are taken away from her as 
fast as she lays them, she will keep 
on laying until about the middle of 
summer, when she will stop for a few 
weeks. She will begin again at the 
close of summer and lay until the 
middle of winter, when she will stop 
a second time. When properly fed 
and taken care of, a hen ought to 
lay more than a hundred eggs in a 
year, but as hens are usually treated 
they do not lay more than thirty to 
forty eggs a year. 


The number of eggs to be given a 
hen when she sits depends on her 
size ; if she is large she can cover 
eleven to thirteen, but if of common 
size, nine will be enough. It is 
usual to take an odd number be¬ 
cause they will lie better in the nest, 
one in the middle and the others 
around it. When sitting, hens should 
have food and fresh water put near 
them every day. Some will come 
off the nest and eat every day, and 
some will sit sometimes two or three 
days without coming off the nest. 
On the twentieth day the chickens 
will chip the shell and come out of 
the egg. As soon as all are hatched 
the hen leaves the nest with her 
brood, and at once begins to scratch 
and feed the little ones. The cock, 
too, often aids her in taking care 
of them, and sometimes, when a hen 
has been killed, a cock has been 
known to raise the motherless chick¬ 
ens himself, brooding them at night 
and giving them the best of care by 
day. Chickens will begin to eat very 
soon after leaving the egg, but it is 
best usually not to feed them until 
the next day, when a few crumbs of 
bread or a little hard-boiled egg 
may be given them. For a few days 
they will need but little food, but 
after two or three weeks they should 
be fed four times a day. When the 
hen comes off the nest with her 
brood, she should be put into a coop, 
with bars in front so that the chick¬ 
ens can run in and out. In warm 
pleasant days this may be put in 
some dry place in the garden or on 
the lawn, but in cold or rainy weath¬ 
er it should be moved into some 
sheltered place, such as a barn or 
outhouse. Care must be taken that 
cats, rats, and weasels do not get 
at them, as they all like young 
chickens. A weasel will often kill 
a whole brood in a night. In about 
seven weeks the chickens will leave 
their mother and earn their own 
living, acting like grown-up fowls 
and going to roost with the others 
by night. 






FOWLS 


257 


FOX 


Care of Fowls. Fowls should have 
a warm dry place to roost in, where 
they can get fresh air, and a large 
playground. If they are kept shut 
up in a small yard, part of it should 
be covered with grass and part with 
gravel, and they should have a good 
supply of pounded oyster-shells, egg¬ 
shells, or old mortar given them, 
as lime is needed to form the shells 
of their eggs. They should also 
have a box of ashes, sand, or dust 
to roll in, as this is necessary to rid 
themselves of vermin. They like any 
kind of grain, and sunflower and 
flax seeds are also good for them. 
Grain is best for them when boiled, 
and they will eat also almost any 
boiled vegetables. The best way is 
to give them a box of mixed grains, 
with openings in the top wide 
enough for them to get their heads 
in. They can then always get food 
when they want it, and they will not 
eat as much as if they are fed only 
at regular times. If kept in a close 
place, they will also need worms, 
insects, or some kind of fresh meat. 
They should always have a plentiful 
supply of pure fresh water. 

Any child can easily learn to take 
care of fowls, which make very 
pretty and interesting pets. In buy¬ 
ing them it is best to get a cock two 
years old, and hens in their second 
year. Hens are best from three to 
five years old ; after their fifth year 
they do not lay So well. In picking 
out hens, take those with bright eyes 
and small bright red combs. Hens 
which have large combs and which 
try to crow are not good for much. 
The cock should be bright, lively, 
and handsome, with clean well-kept 
feathers, and a proud air. An old 
one can be told by the dulness of his 
feathers, comb, and wattles, and by 
the large scales on his legs. One 
cock is enough for ten or fifteen hens. 

Fowls belong to the order ra~ 
sores, or scratching birds, and to 
the pheasant family, which includes, 
besides pheasants, peacocks, tur¬ 
keys, and Guinea fowls. 


The word fowl is from the Anglo- 
Saxon fugol, a bird, which is made 
from flug, flight. 

FOX. The fox looks some like 
the dog, but is not so tall. It has a 
sharp nose, pointed ears, slender 
legs, fine thick fur, and a long bushy 
tail. It is very shy and cunning, 
and usually keeps hidden in the day¬ 
time, coming out at twilight and 
wandering round by night in search 
of its prey. The fox usually lives in 
a burrow which it digs in the earth 
among rocks, or under the roots of a 
tree, always in a place where the 
rain cannot run into it. Its house is 
usually in three parts : an entrance, 
where it lies and watches a while 
before coming out ; a store-room, 
where it hides its food, and which 
has several openings ; and behind 
that its sleeping place. But the fox 
seldom sleeps in its burrow, except 
when it is raising its young ; it pre¬ 
fers to spend the night near where it 
can find plunder, which is often miles 
away from its home. It is very care¬ 
ful of its young, of which it usually 
has three to five at a time. The 
male and female live together un¬ 
til the young are able to take care 
of themselves, and then separate. 
Foxes generally live thirteen or four¬ 
teen years. 

The fox is cowardly, and never at¬ 
tacks animals which are stronger 
than itself. It lives chiefly on 
birds, rabbits, hares, and other small 
game. It has a great liking for 
poultry, and loves to suck eggs, and 
also likes some fruits, especially 
grapes. When a fox finds a poultry 
yard it wanders around until it finds 
a weak place, and then watching its 
chance goes in in the night and kills 
all it can catch, carrying off its plun¬ 
der and hiding it in its burrow for 
future use. Sometimes, when fowls 
wander about a farm, a fox will lie in 
wait at the edge of a wood and carry 
them off, one by one. A story is told 
of two foxes who had a clever way 
of catching hares. One of them hid 
himself by the side of a road, and 







FOX 


25S 


FROG 


the other drove the hares into the 
road, barking now and then to let 
his companion know which way they 
were coming. When one came with¬ 
in reach the one watcing pounced 
upon it, and the two then divided 
the feast. 

The fox is not easily tamed, but 
sometimes, when taken young from 
the nest, can be taught as well as a 
dog. But it will never lose it's taste 
for thieving. A funny story is told 
of a tame fox which belonged to a 
druggist in a small town in France. 
Its master lived in a house on the 
market-place, and close by it was an 
egg-stand, kept by a poor woman 
who bought eggs from the peasants 
and packed them to send to Paris. 
Before packing, all the cracked ones 
were picked out and laid aside. One 
day the old woman, who had laid 
two dozen cracked eggs behind 
her, was astonished, on turning 
round, to see that they were gone. 
She accused her neighbor of robbing 
her, but she denied it. The next 
day the same thing happened, and 
again on the third day, and though 
a watch was kept, nothing was found 
out. The old woman then put her 
eggs under her petticoat, between 
her feet, but they still disappeared, 
and as she was sure that no one had 
been near enough to get them from 
under her, the theft was laid to witch¬ 
craft. But not long afterward the 
truth was found out. Behind the 
old woman’s chair were two very 
small openings made to let air into 
the cellar of the druggist’s house. 
They were so narrow that no one 
would have thought that any animal 
could squeeze into one of them, but 
one day the tame fox was seen to 
run out its head, seize an egg, and 
draw it in, and so the thief was found 
out. 

The senses of sight, hearing, and 
smell are very sharp in the fox, and 
it can run very fast. It uses many 
tricks to escape its enemies, but as it 
has a little bag at the root of the tail 
filled with a very strong scent, it is 


easily tracked by dogs, and often run 
down by huntsmen with hounds. In 
England fox-hunting with dogs and 
hounds is considered fine sport. 
There used to be a good deal of it in 
the Southern States, and lately there 
have been several hunts on Long 
Island, near New York. Some¬ 
times, when a fox has been run down 
by hunters, it will make believe dead, 
and may be kicked and cuffed, held 
up by the tail, or carried over the 
shoulder without showing any signs 
of life ; but the moment it sees a 
chance to escape it will scamper 
away, to the astonishment of the 
hunters. 

The principal kinds of foxes in the 
United States are the red fox, 
found chiefly in the Northern and 
Middle States, and the gray fox, in 
the Southern States. The gray fox 
is not so cunning as the red one, and 
lives usually in hollow trees and holes 
in rocks. It seldom steals chickens, 
but robs the nests of wild turkeys 
and chases rabbits and other small 
game. The prairie fox, found in the 
prairies of the West, is like the red 
fox in color, but is larger and has 
finer fur. In Washington Territory 
is found the black fox, much prized 
for its fur. The nobles of Russia 
and mandarins of China value this 
fur above all others, and pay very 
high prices for it. The Arctic or 
blue fox lives in the most northerly 
parts of America, Russia, and 
Siberia. Its fur is very long, soft, 
and thick, and is sometimes white, 
but often of a gray slate color tinged 
with blue. It is much hunted, and 
there is a large trade in its skins. 

The fox is a mammal of the order 
carnivora , or flesh-eating animals, 
and of the dog family, which in¬ 
cludes, besides the dog, the wolf and 
the jackal. 

The word fox is Anglo-Saxon. 

FROG. When full grown, frogs 
have four legs, with four toes on the 
fore feet and five on the hind feet. 
The hinder legs are very long, so 
that they are good leapers, and they 





FROG 


259 


FROG 


are usually webbed, so that they 
swim well. They pass their time 
mostly in the water or in moist 
places, but often travel considerable 
distances across the land in dry times 
in search of water. All kinds of 
frogs live on animal food, eating 
MOLLUSKS, worms, and insects, but 
the large bull-frog, which is found 
only in North America, will eat 
moles, mice, young ducks, small 
snakes, and any other small animal 
it can catch. They have very large 
mouths, with teeth only in the upper 
jaw, and long soft tongues which 
they dart out to catch insects. It is 


their custom to sit and watch for 
prey, and when anything comes near 
enough they spring upon it with 
great swiftness. In the autumn they 
cease to eat, and as cold weather 
comes on bury themselves deeply in 
mud, many of them together in the 
same place. Thus hidden, they pass 
the winter in a numb state ; but in 
the spring they get active again little 
by little, and come out of the mud. 

Soon after waking the female lays 
her eggs on the top of still water. 
These may often be seen in ponds 
and ditches in the country in the 
spring, floating on the water and 



Growth of the Frog, showing the changes from the egg nearly to the perfect form. 


looking like froth or air-bubbles. 
When looked at closely they are seen 
to be made up of little round masses of 
a gluey matter, with a black speck in 
each. The mother leaves the eggs 
and pays no more attention to them. 
In a few days the little black spot 
begins to grow, and at last makes its 
way out of the gluey envelope and 
swims. It is now what is commonly 
called a tadpole, which has a tail but 
no legs, and which breathes through 
gills like a fish. After a time the 
hind legs begin to grow, and the fore 
legs soon follow. Then the tail be¬ 


gins to wither away, the lungs 
grow, the gills disappear, and finally 
the frog leaves the water and be¬ 
comes an air-breathing land animal. 
In the picture are shown the different 
stages of growth of the tadpole al¬ 
most to the time when it becomes a 
frog. In 1 the tadpole is shown just 
before it leaves the egg, and in 2 just 
after leaving the egg ; in 3 and 4 
are seen the growth of the gills ; 5 
shows a further change, and 6 is a 
side view of the same ; in 7 the hind 
legs are first seen, and in 8 both pairs 
of legs are grown and the tail is 














FROG 


260 


FRUIT 


withering away. These changes in 
the frog may easily be watched by 
gathering some frogs’ eggs, and put¬ 
ting them with some water plants in 
an aquarium, or in a gold-fish 
globe. 

Most tadpoles become perfect frogs 
during the summer after they are 
hatched, but those of the common 
bull-frog seldom change fully until 
the next spring, spending the win¬ 
ter, like full-grown frogs, in the 
mud, in a numb state. Snakes, 
fishes, and many kinds of birds feed 
on tadpoles and little frogs. If this 
were not so, all the ponds would be¬ 
come filled with them, for one frog 
will sometimes lay more than a thou¬ 
sand eggs. 

All frogs croak, but the male frog 
makes the most noise. When many 
are singing together, their voices can 
be heard at a great distance. In 
old times, when castles and country 
houses in Europe were surrounded 
by moats, or ditches filled with 
water, men and boys were made to 
beat the water in the morning and 
evening to keep the frogs from croak¬ 
ing and spoiling the sleep of the lords 
and ladies. 

Frogs are harmless animals, and 
do much good by destroying insects, 
slugs, and worms. The hinder legs 
of some frogs are eaten, and are much 
more delicate than the tenderest 
chicken. 

Tree Frogs are smaller, brighter, 
handsomer, and more lively than 
other frogs, and they differ from them 
in having little suckers on the ends 
of their toes, by means of which they 
can climb trees and even walk head 
downward like flies on any smooth 
surface. Their skin is smooth on 
the back, but warty underneath. 
They can change their color, which 
helps them to escape from their en¬ 
emies. The common tree frog of the 
Northern United States varies from 
an ashy to a dark brown color. It is 
usually found on decaying trees and 
old fences overgrown with mosses 
and lichens, which are so near its 


color that it is hard to see it. In the 
Southern States most of the tree 
frogs are green above and yellowish 
below. All tree frogs make a good 
deal of noise in warm weather toward 
evening, especially before rain. In 
winter they bury themselves in mud 
like other frogs, and breed in spring, 
laying their eggs in water. In the 
island of Borneo is a kind of flying 
tree frog, with very long toes, joined 
together with a thin skin, by means 
of which they can sail long distances 
from the top of one tree to another, 
in the same way with the flying 
SQUIRREL. 

Frogs and toads are of the class 
amphibians, of vertebrate animals. 

The word frog is from the Anglo- 
Saxon frogga. 

FROST, crystals of frozen DEW. 
When the watery vapor in the air is 
so cool that it cannot condense, or 
turn to water, without going below 
the freezing point (32 0 F.), it will fall 
to the earth in the shape of frost 
crystals instead of dew. This is 
sometimes called Hoar Frost, and 
sometimes white frost. This is differ¬ 
ent from freezing, commonly called 
frost, which is simply the hardening 
of water and moisture from the cold 
of winter. The frost work on the 
inside of window panes in warm 
rooms in cold weather, which some¬ 
times takes the form of ferns or 
feathers of ice, is also a freezing, and 
not a true frost. Moisture from the 
warm air of the room gathers on the 
glass, just as dew falls on the grass, 
and is cooled and frozen there. But 
true frost is not frozen dew, that is, 
moisture which falls as dew and 
freezes afterward, but moisture which 
falls already formed in ice crystals. 
Black frost is caused by a cold so 
severe that plants freeze and turn 
black, without showing any signs 
of hoar frost on the outside. 

The word frost is from the Anglo- 
Saxon forst or frost, from freosan, 
to freeze. 

FRUIT. In the article Flowers, 
which should be read before this, is 





FRUIT 


261 


FRUIT 


told how the ovary of the pistil is left 
on PLANTS when the flower drops off 
or withers, and finally grows into the 
fruit. The fruit therefore of any 
plant is the part which holds the 
seed, and this is always the ovary 
of the pistil of the flower. In com¬ 
mon language we call only the juicy 
eatable part fruit, but the seed-holder 
of the morning glory and of the rose 
are as much fruits as the apple, the 
orange, and the walnut. After the 
flower withers, the stem on which it 
grew keeps fresh, and the sap flows 
along through it just as it did when 
the flower grew. We cannot see any 
difference in the sap, and we cannot 
tell why it stops making flowers and 
changes to making fruit ; we only 
know that the same kind of sap which 
makes the plant grow and bear flow¬ 
ers causes the pistil to grow into the 
fruit. 

Fruits grow in many different 
forms. A simple fruit is a seed- 
holder formed by the ripening of one 
pistil. There are three kinds of sim¬ 
ple fruits : 1, fleshy fruits ; 2, stone 
fruits ; and 3, dry fruits. 

1. Fleshy Fruits may be divided 
into berries, gourd fruits, and apple 
fruits. 

Berries are commonly understood 
to be such fruits as the currant, 
huckleberry, strawberry, and black¬ 
berry ; but strawberries and black¬ 
berries are really not berries, as will 
be shown hereafter. A berry is a 
seed-holder where the seeds are shut 
up in fleshy or pulpy matter, with a 
soft skin on the outside. Tomatoes 
are berries, as well as grapes, cran¬ 
berries, gooseberries, currants, and 
huckleberries. The orange, lemon, 
and lime are also berries, with a 
thick rind or skin. 

Gourd fruits (usually called pepos, 
from Greek pepon, a kind of melon) 
is only a kind of berry with a hard 
rind. All kinds of melons, squashes, 
cucumbers, etc., are gourd fruits. 

Apple fruits (usually called pomes, 
from Latin pomum, an apple) are ap¬ 
ples, pears, and quinces. In these 


the fleshy part which we eat is made 
from the calyx of the flower and not 
from the pistil. In the quince the 
calyx, which grows thick and fleshy, 
forms the whole of the body of the 
fruit; but in the pear and the apple 
the flesh of the core comes from the 
pistil. If an apple be cut in two 
crosswise, little greenish dots will be 
seen running around the core ; all 
inside of these comes from the pistil, 
and all outside from the calyx. 

2. Stone Fruits (usually called 
drupes, from Latin drupa , an over¬ 
ripe olive), like berries, are made up 
of fleshy or pulpy matter with a skin, 
but their seeds, instead of lying in the 
pulp, are shut up in a hard shell like 
that of a nut. This shell or stone 
does not belong to the seed, but is a 
part of the fruit ; the seed, which is 
inside of it, has a cover or skin of its 
own. Among the principal stone 
fruits are the cherry, plum, peach, 
apricot, and olive. 

3. Dry Fruits are those which 
ripen without any pulp or fleshy part. 
There are two kinds : those which 
keep closed, holding the seed until 
they grow, and those which burst 
open and scatter their seed. 

Those which hold their seed are 
principally four kinds: the akene, the 
grain, the nut, and the key. 

The akene includes all small, dry, 
hard, one-seeded fruits, like the 
fruits of the buttercup. These are 
commonly thought to be seeds, but 
when cut open the seed is found in¬ 
side. Each little part of the dande¬ 
lion and the sunflower, commonly 
called a seed, is an akene. 

A grain is the same as an akene, 
but the seed, instead of being sepa¬ 
rate, is stuck so closely to the seed- 
holder that the two form only one 
part. Wheat, barley, rye, rice, oats, 
Indian corn, etc., belong in this 
class. 

A nut is also like an akene, but is 
larger. Acorns, chestnuts, beech¬ 
nuts, and hazel nuts are real nuts. In 
all these the nut is surrounded by a 
kind of cup. In the acorn this is a 





FRUIT 


262 


FUNGI 


scaly cup in which the fruit sits ; in 
the chestnut and beechnut it is a kind 
of bur ; and in the hazel¬ 
nut it is a leafy envelope 
or covering. The fruits 
of the walnut family, in¬ 
cluding the English wal¬ 
nut, black walnut, butter¬ 
nut, hickory-nut, and pe¬ 
can-nut, are not real nuts, 
but are between a stone- 
fruit and a nut. 

A key or key-fruit is an 
akene, or any other seed¬ 
holding fruit, which has 
a wing. The fruits of the 
c- , ash, elm, and maple are 
Key-fruit key-fruits. The ash and 
—Ash. elm are single ones, but 
the maple is double and 
has two wings, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture. 

All these kinds of fruits, akenes, 
grains, nuts, and key- 
fruits, keep their shells or 
seed-holders closed until 
they decay or until the 
seed begins to grow, when 
of course they open to let 
out the root and bud. The 
dry fruits whose seed- 
Sinele holders split or burst open 
Key-fruit an< ^ ^ et out the seeds when 
—Elm. they are ripe are generally 
called pods. There are 
several kinds of pod fruits. Those 
which split down one side only, like 
the pods of the columbine and peony, 



Double Key-fruit—Maple. 


are called follicles ; those which split 
into two pieces, like peas, beans, and 
peanuts, are called legumes ; and 


those which split into several pieces, 
like the pods of the lily, flower de 
luce, and the morning glory, are 
called capsules. 

Compound Fruits. All these fruits 
are simple fruits, made by the ripen¬ 
ing of one pistil. Most fruits are of 
this kind, but there are a few com¬ 
pound or mixed kinds of fruits. The 
raspberry and the blackberry are 
called aggregated fruits, because they 
are made up of many simple fruits 
aggregated or collected together. 
Each grain of these fruits is really a 
stone-fruit, like a little plum or 
cherry. The strawberry is called an 
accessory fruit, because the fleshy 
part is accessory—that is, something 
added to the seed-holder. The juicy 
part which we eat is really not a fruit 
at all, but only the end of the flower- 
stalk, grown large and fleshy. The 
real fruits of the strawberry are what 
are commonly called the seeds, which 
are scattered over the outside of the 
fleshy part. Each one of these is an 
akene, a seed-holder containing one 
seed. 

Another class of compound fruits 
are called multiple fruits, which are 
masses of fruits made up from dif¬ 
ferent flowers. The mulberry is a 
multiple fruit. It looks like a black¬ 
berry, but all the grains of each 
blackberry come from one flower, 
while in the mulberry each grain 
comes from a different flower. The 
pineapple is also a multiple fruit. 

The word fruit is from the Latin 
fructus , fruit, from fruor , I enjoy. 

FUNGI, a family of flowerless 
PLANTS, which in their different 
forms are commonly called mush¬ 
rooms, toadstools, ' smut, rust, 
blight, mould, mildew, and other 
names. Fungi are a lower kind of 
plants than LICHENS, but some of 
them are so nearly like lichens that 
they can scarcely be told from them. 
They differ from lichens chiefly in 
drawing their food from the things 
on which they grow. They are also 
softer than lichens, and do not live 
so long. Fungi usually grow in 








FUNGI 


263 


FUNGI 


clamp places, and are most plentiful 
in countries where the heat is not too 
great. They are found wherever 
there are decaying plants, on which 
they chiefly feed. Some grow very 
quickly, often springing up in a single 
night and dying with the coming of 
the sun, and some grow very slowly, 
and add to their growth each year. 
Some are hard like horn, some are 
like paper or leather, some are 
almost like flesh, and some are 
nearly like water. Some are so 
small they can scarcely be seen, and 
others will measure several feet 
round. Fungi have been used for 
food from the most ancient times, 
and some kinds are still much eaten. 

The Mushroom is the most widely 
used for food, and is much raised in 
hotbeds, cellars, and caves. Near 
Paris are great caves made by cut¬ 
ting out stones for building, and in 
them are immense mushroom beds, 
many miles long, where great quan¬ 
tities are raised for market. There 
are several kinds of mushrooms 
which are good to eat, but the kind 
mostly eaten is the common field 
mushroom, which grows wild in 
Europe and America. It has a 
white, thick stem, with a fleshy cap, 
white above and pink underneath. 
It is easily told by its pleasant smell; 
but those who do not know mush¬ 
rooms well should not gather them, 
as there are many poisonous kinds, 
usually called toadstools. Mush¬ 
rooms are eaten either stewed, 
broiled, or baked, or are used as a 
flavor for other dishes. They are 
also make into catsup. 

The word mushroom is from the 
French mousseron , from mousse , 
moss, because mushrooms often 
grow in moss. 

The Truffle is a kind of fungus 
which grows underground like the 
potato. Truffles are mostly found 
in woods, usually where oak, beech, 
and chestnut trees grow. They are 
generally about the size of a walnut, 
but some are much larger ; some are 
nearly white, but most of them are 


brownish and rough or warty on the 
outside. They are commonly found 
about a foot underground in loose 
soil, and are dug up with a hoe or 
pick. In England they hunt for 
them with trained dogs, which find 
the places where they grow by the 
scent, and point them out just as a 
pointer does game. When the 
truffle is dug up, the dog is rewarded 
with something to eat. In France 
pigs are taught to find them in the 
same way. No truffles have yet 
been found in the United States, but 
they abound in Europe and Africa, 
and many are brought to this country 
in sealed tin cans. They are much 
liked for flavoring meats and sauces. 

The word truffle is from the Latin 
tuber , a swelling. 

Mildew, Smut, and Rust. Some 
kinds of fungi grow on plants and 
destroy them, and are therefore 
much dreaded by farmers. Among 
the most common and most injuri¬ 
ous are the rust and smut which de¬ 
stroy wheat and other grains. The 
mildew on grape vines, the black 
warts on plum trees, and the rot in 
potatoes are all fungi, which grow 
upon and in them and cause them 
to decay. Fungi often grow on the 
skins of fruits, making the black 
scaly-like patches seen on apples, 
pears, and plums. Hop vines, pea 
vines, Indian corn, and various other 
kinds of vegetables are often attacked 
by mildew, and rose bushes are fre¬ 
quently spoiled by it. Indeed, there 
is scarcely any plant, wild or culti¬ 
vated, which is not troubled with 
fungi. 

Mould. What is commonly called 
mould or mouldiness on animal or veg¬ 
etable substances is made by many 
small fungi which grow together in 
a mass and soon cover any decaying 
thing. Mould grows plentifully on 
fruit, preserves, and paste, and 
makes them decay faster. A kind 
of blue mould is found on bread and 
cheese; it spoils bread, but is 
thought by some to give a good 
flavor to cheese. Other kinds of 






FUR 


264 


FUSTIC 


mould or mildew grow on linen or 
cotton cloth, and on paper, when 
kept in damp places. Paper mould 
is often seen on paper pasted on 
damp walls, and similar fungi also 
grow on plastered walls them¬ 
selves. 

The word fungi is the plural of 
fungus, which in Latin means a 
mushroom. 

FUR, the short soft hair of animals, 
growing next to the skin and under 
the hair, which is longer and coars¬ 
er. Skins dressed with the fur on, 
and from which the long hairs have 
been pulled, are called furs ; before 
being dressed, they are called pelts. 
Before they are fit for use skins have 
to be thoroughly steeped and scoured 
in a bath of bran, alum, and salt, 
then washed in soap and soda, and 
cleansed and dried. The alum tans 
the skin into a kind of kid leather. 
Some furs are afterward dyed, but 
the only one improved by this is the 
fur of the seal, which is changed 
from a dirty yellow to a rich brown, 
while its hairs, which in the live 
animal are curly and not very 
smooth, become straight and of a 
velvety softness. All skins are of 


irregular shapes, and differ much in 
color in different parts. They are 
therefore cut up into pieces, and 
then fitted together again according 
to colors or tints. This needs 
much skill, as the pieces have to be 
sewn edge to edge, so that the 
seams will not show. A fur cloak 
made of a valuable fur is often made 
up of a great number of odd-shaped 
pieces. 

The principal fur-bearing animals 
are the sable, marten, mink, er¬ 
mine, beaver, otter, chinchilla, fox, 
seal, nutria, badger, rabbit, fisher, 
lynx, bear, and wolf. (See Felt 
and Hat.) 

The word fur is from the new 
Latin furra, a hairy skin. 

FUSTIC, a dye-wood obtained 
from a tree which grows in South 
America and the West Indies. 
When boiled it makes a yellow dye, 
which is used chiefly in dyeing 
cloths and yarns which have been 
first dyed blue, the fustic changing 
them to green. Fustic is brought, 
in the form of long sticks or logs, 
from the countries where it grows. 

The word fustic is from the Latin 
f testis, a stick. 






Gr 


GALLS, GALL NUTS, or NUT- 
GALLS, small lumps or swellings 
which grow on a kind of oak tree, 
chiefly in Asia Minor and Central 
Asia. They are made by a fly which 
pierces the young boughs and lays 
its eggs in them. This causes them 
to swell up into galls, in which 
the young of the fly live until they 
are grown, when they eat their 



Nut-Galls. 


way out. The best galls are those 
which are picked before the in¬ 
sect has come out ; they are then 
dark blue or black, but after the in¬ 
sect has left the galls become white. 
Galls are usually from the size of 
peas to that of nutmegs, are hard 
and brittle, and covered with knobs. 
They have in them an ACID called 


much used in dyeing, calico-print¬ 
ing, and in making ink. 

Apples of Sodom, which are 
brought by travellers as curiosities 
from the shores of the Dead Sea, are 
large galls full of dust and larvae, or 
the grubs of insects. 

The word gall is from the Latin 
galla , a gall nut. 

GAMBOGE or CAMBOGE, the 
hardened juice of a tree which 
grows in Siam, Cochin China, and 
Ceylon. The juice is caught, when 
it runs from the tree, in cocoanut 
shells, and put into earthern vessels 
to thicken. Before it is hard it is 
poured into hollow joints of bamboo, 
where it hardens into round sticks. 
Sometimes it is made into lumps 
and cakes. The best gamboge is of 
an orange yellow when dry, but 
bright yellow when rubbed in water. 
It is used in medicine and as a 
paint. 

The word gamboge or camboge 
is made from Cambodia, the name 
of the country from which it was 
first brought. 

GARLIC, a kind of small ONION, 
with a strong flavor and rank smell t 
much used for seasoning food, es¬ 
pecially in Spain, France, and Italy. 
The bulb is made up of several 
small bulbs, called cloves. The juice 
of garlic makes a strong cement for 
mending broken glass and china. 
It is also used as a medicine, mostly 
for rubbing on the skin in cases of 
fever and in nervous diseases in chil¬ 
dren. Wild garlic grows in pas¬ 
tures, and as it comes up early in 
the spring, cows eat it with the early 

265 


gallic acid, which is very useful for 
tanning leather, and they are also 



GARNET 


266 


GAS 


grass, and their milk and butter often 
smell strongly of it. 

The word garlic is from the Anglo- 
Saxon gdrleiic, which is from gar, 
spear, and leac, leek, because the 
leaves stand up like spears. 

GARNET, a dark red precious 
STONE, something like the ruby, but 
cheaper, called by the ancients car¬ 
buncle. When cut round and flat, 
like a drop of tallow, the garnet is 
still called carbuncle. There are also 
black, brown, green, and yellow 
garnets. The kinds most prized 
are the red and the black, which are 
often cut and set as jewels, or made 
into beads for necklaces. Some of 
the red ones, when set in gold, look 
almost as well as rubies. The best 
garnets come from Ceylon, Pegu, 
and Greenland. 

The word garnet was once spelled 
granate, and is from the Latin 
granatum, a pomegranate, because 
the red garnet is like the seeds of 
that fruit in shape and color. 

GAS. In the article Element is 
explained the difference between a 
solid, a fluid, and a gas. The com¬ 
mon gas which we burn for light is 
made out of coal. You can make 
some very easily. Break a piece of 
bituminous or soft coal into little 
bits, fill the bowl of a tobacco pipe 
with them, and cover the mouth over 
with moist clay and dry it. When 
well dried put the bowl into the fire 
where it will heat red hot. In a 
short time a kind of yellow smoke 
will come out of the stem of the pipe, 
which will burn with a bright flame 
when lighted. 

This smoke is coal gas, but it is 
not pure like that which we burn in 
our houses. If the end of the pipe 
stem be put under water, the gas 
will rise up through the water in 
bubbles. You can collect these 
bubbles of gas in a small bottle or 
other vessel in a very simple way. 
Fill the bottle full of water and turn 
it upside down in a bowl of water. 
The water will not run out of the 
bottle, because the pressure of the 


air on the water in the bowl will 
keep it in its place. If now the end 
of the pipe stem be put under the 
mouth of the bottle, the bubbles of 
gas will go up into it, and push the 
water down little by little ; and if 
there be gas enough made in the 
pipe bowl, it will finally fill the bottle 
full, taking the place of the water. 
Thus you will have a bottle of gas, 
which will burn when lighted. All 
the coal gas used in cities and towns 
is made and collected in the same 
way, only the coal is heated in 
great brick or iron ovens instead of 
in tobacco pipes, and the gas is col¬ 
lected in immense iron gas-holders 
instead of in bottles. 

If now you take off the clay from 
the pipe you will find some COKE in 
the bowl. This is some of the car¬ 
bon of the coal; a part only of the 
carbon has gone off with all the hy¬ 
drogen to make the gas, and this 
is all that is left. When we burn 
coal in the open air we get from it 
flame and ashes, but when we burn 
it in tight ovens, we thus get gas 
and coke. In making gas the coal 
is not really burned, but distilled 
(see Alcohol), and the gas passes 
off from the coal without making 
any flame. The ovens for distilling 
coal are called retorts. Several are 
usually built up together, so they 
may all be heated by one furnace, 
for there must be a fire outside the 
retort to heat the coal inside. When 
the retorts are filled with coal, the 
doors are closed tight and the coal 
inside is heated red hot, when it 
gives off air, steam, tar, ammonia, 
and gas. All these pass off into a 
great pipe at the back of the re¬ 
torts ; the tar and ammonia run off 
into cisterns, and the hot gas goes 
into coolers, where it is cooled. It 
is next purified by passing over lime, 
which takes up all the ACIDS in it, 
and lastly is put into the gas-hold¬ 
ers for use. 

The gas-holders are the great 
round iron boxes, as large and as 
tall as houses, which you see at all 





GAS 


267 


GELATINE 


gas-works. Each one is open at the 
bottom, which stands in an immense 
tank of water and is so hung with 
weights and chains that it will float 
in it, and will rise as the gas collects 
in it. When full of gas, gas-holders 
stand up very high, but as their bot¬ 
toms are all the time under water, 
none of the gas can leak out. Large 
gas mains or pipes lead from the 
gas-holders underground through 
the streets, and the great weight of 
the gas-holders pressing down on 
the gas in them keeps the pipes full 
and forces the gas through the small¬ 
er pipes into houses and stores. In 
each place where gas is used the gas 
passes from the pipe leading in from 
the street through a little box called 
a meter (Greek metron, measure), 
which not only measures it but keeps 
an account of it, so that the gas com¬ 
pany can tell, by looking at the me¬ 
ter, just how much gas has been 
burned. 

After passing through the meter 
the gas is carried through small 
pipes all through the building where 
it is used. These small pipes end in 
burners, where the gas is lighted. A 
burner is nothing more than a little 
opening in the end of the pipe to let 
the gas through, but as the gas will 
give more light if every bit of it be 
burned, various kinds of burners have 
been made, some with rows of little 
holes and some with little slits of 
different shapes, so that all of it will 
get to the oxygen of the air and none 
pass off as smoke. Thus we have 
fish-tail, fan-tail, swallow-tail, bat¬ 
wing, and other burners. The Ar- 
gand burner (see Lamp), so made 
that the gas comes out in a circle of 
little jets and has a glass chimney 
fitted to it, is one of the best, as it 
gives a very steady light. 

Coal Tar. The tar which runs 
out of the coal in making gas was 
for a long time looked upon as al- 
must worthless. It was used to 
paint iron fences and other iron out 
of doors to keep it from rusting, to 
mix with gravel to put on to roofs, 


and to mix with dirt to make side¬ 
walks. But after a time it was found 
out that many valuable things could 
be made from it, among which are 
naphtha, used for dissolving India- 
rubber and for mixing with differ¬ 
ent resins for making varnishes. 
From naphtha are made a kind of 
oil called benzole, used in lamps, 
other oils used for oiling machinery, 
for preserving wood from rotting, 
and for making dyes. From it are 
also got a good many acids, espe¬ 
cially carbolic acid ; the substance 
called aniline, from which the beau¬ 
tiful dyes called aniline colors are 
made ; and paraffine, used in mak¬ 
ing candles. All these things are 
made by distilling (see Alcohol) 
coal tar in a close iron vessel. After 
the oils and other substances have 
passed off as steam, what is left in 
the vessel becomes solid on cooling, 
and forms a kind of pitch or as- 
phaltum, used in laying wooden 
pavements. 

The word gas was made by a phy¬ 
sician named Van Helmont, (born 
in Brussels in 1577), and given to all 
substances like air. It is from the 
Dutch geest, German geist, mean¬ 
ing spirit. 

CAUZE, a very light fabric of silk 
or linen, so thin that one can see 
through it. In weaving, gauze is 
something between plain weaving 
(see Loom) and plain lace or bob¬ 
bin net. An inferior kind of gauze 
is made of silk and cotton ; and 
there is also a flannel called gauze 
flannel. 

The word gauze was made from 
Gaza, a city of Palestine, whence it 
was first brought ; the Spanish still 
call it gas a. 

GAZELLE. See Antelope. 

GELATINE, an animal substance 
which melts easily in hot water, but 
which stiffens like a jelly in cooling. 
It is usually made from clippings of 
hides, hoofs, horns, and the feet of 
calves, cows, sheep, pigs, and other 
animals. These are carefully cleaned 
and boiled for a long time ; the liq- 





GIMP 


268 


GINGHAM 


uor is then strained and allowed 
to gelatinize or form a jelly. This 
jelly, which is called size, has a very 
bad smell, but it is sometimes puri¬ 
fied with sulphurous acid and used 
for ISINGLASS. When not purified, 
it is cut into slices, dried, and sold 
as GLUE. 

In the article Bone is told how 
by soaking a bone in weak acid all 
the hard part is eaten out and only 
the soft part is left. By boiling this 
soft part it will turn into size, which, 
when cool, becomes gelatine. 

Gelatine is made up into beauti¬ 
ful sheets, some of which are clear 
like glass and some beautifully col¬ 
ored and stamped with ornamental 
designs. These sheets are used in¬ 
stead of glass in France for covering 
lanterns. Apothecaries make a large 
usq of gelatine for covering pills and 
for making capsules to put bad tast¬ 
ing medicines in. A very pure kind 
of gelatine, prepared in France 
from bones, is also much used by 
cooks, instead of isinglass, for mak¬ 
ing desserts. 

The word gelatine is from the 
Latin gelare, to stiffen with cold. 

GIMP, a kind of trimming used 
on dressses, curtains, and furniture. 
It is made of silk, wool, or cotton, 
with a fine wire or cord twisted 
among the threads to stiffen it. 

The word gimp is in German 
gimf . 

GIN, an alcoholic liquor, distilled 
from rye and barley and flavored 
with juniper berries. It was first 
made in Holland, whence it was 
often called hollands. It is also call¬ 
ed sometimes Schiedam schnapps , 
because there are a great many gin 
distilleries at Schiedam. Pure gin 
is about half alcohol. 

The word gin is shortened from 
geneva, which is from the French 
genibvre, JUNIPER. Schnapps is 
a Dutch and German word meaning 
a dram. 

GINGER, a kind of spice made 
from the root of a plant which grew 
first in Asia, but is now raised largely 


in the West Indies. The root, which 
is about as large round as a man’s 
finger, is dug up when the stem 
withers, and scalded, dried, scraped, 
and washed. The young roots, pre¬ 
served in sugar syrup, make a deli¬ 
cious sweetmeat, called candied gin¬ 
ger, which is sent to foreign coun¬ 
tries from China, the East Indies, 
and the West Indies. 

Ginger has much starch in it. Its 
strong taste is given to it by a light 
yellow oil, called oil of ginger. Es¬ 
sence of ginger is used as a medi¬ 
cine and by cooks for flavoring, and 
the spice itself, made by grinding the 
roots to powder, is used for making 
GINGERBREAD, ginger cakes, gin¬ 
ger beer, ginger pop, and ginger 
wine. 

The word gingerwas once spelled 
gingiber, and is from the Latin 
zingiber , ginger. 

GINGERBREAD, a kind of cake 
flavored with ginger. It is made in 
several ways, in soft cakes one or 
two inches thick, in thin cakes called 
ginger-snaps, or in small button-like 
cakes called ginger-nuts. Ginger¬ 
bread is often seen in bakers’ win¬ 
dows made into figures of men, ani¬ 
mals, and other things, and painted 
and gilded. In old times such fig¬ 
ures were largely sold in country 
fairs in England, and from them or¬ 
namental work cut or carved into 
strange forms came to be called 
“ gingerbread-work. ” The doum 
palm, of Eygpt, is sometimes called 
the gingerbread tree, because its 
bark looks like gingerbread. Gin¬ 
gerbread is said to have been sold 
in Paris as early as the fourteenth 
century. In those days it was made 
out of rye flour, kneaded with honey 
and ginger ; but afterward, in Eng¬ 
land, wheat flour and molasses were 
used. 

The word gingerbread is made up 
of GINGER and BREAD. 

GINGHAM, a kind of colored cot¬ 
ton cloth first made in India. Its 
colors are woven in, instead of 
printed on as in calico, the yarn 






GIRAFFE 


269 


GIRAFFE 


being dyed. Some ginghams are of 
one color, like those used for cover¬ 
ing umbrellas, and some of two or 
more colors woven in checks or 
stripes. 

The word gingham is probably 
from the Javanese word gingga?ig, 
gingham. 

GIRAFFE. This beautiful animal 
is found wild only in Africa. The 
first one ever seen in Europe was 
shown by Julius Caesar in the circus 
in Rome, and others were after¬ 
ward exhibited there by other em¬ 
perors ; but after the fall of Rome 
no live one was ever taken to Europe 
until 1827, when the Pacha of Egypt 
gave one to the French and one to 
the English. Many giraffes have 
since been brought from Africa and 
shown in menageries, both in Eu¬ 
rope and in this country, and now 
almost every child knows how one 
looks. 

A full-grown giraffe is sixteen or 
seventeen feet high, or nearly three 
times as tall as a man. Its long 
neck enables it to eat from the tops 
of high trees, the leaves of which 
make a large part of its food. Its 
tongue is long and slender, and can 
be run far out to draw leaves and 
branches toward its mouth. Between 
its ears are two short horns, not 
like those of the ox, but only bones 
covered with a hairy skin. Its body 
is short, and is higher in front than 
behind, so that the backbone slants 
downward. Its legs are slender, 
and the feet have cloven hoofs, like 
those of an ox. The skin, which is 
of a light reddish orange marked 
with large spots of a darker color, 
is covered with short hair. The 
neck has a short mane, and the tail 
has a tuft of black hairs at its end. 
The giraffe’s gait is very awkward, 
as it moves both the legs on one 
side at the same time, like a pacing 
horse, but it can run very fast, and 
only a swift horse can catch it. 

Giraffes live usually in families of 
about a dozen, generally on the edge 
of deserts where they can see all 


round. Their chief enemies are the 
lion and the panther, from which 
they can run away in the open coun¬ 
try ; but when a giraffe is caught in 
woods by one of these beasts, it 
fights with its fore feet with such 
force that it sometimes kills or drives 
it off, but is often killed itself. The 
Hottentots lie in wait for the gi¬ 
raffe near its watering places, and 
shoot it with poisoned arrows. 
They eat its flesh, and make straps, 
cups, and leather bottles out of its 
thick skin. The Arabs are also very 
fond of giraffe meat, and they make 
shields of its hide and thread and 
strings of its long sinews and ten¬ 
dons. Many giraffes are now hunted 
for menageries, but it is very sel¬ 
dom that a full-grown one is caught. 
They are usually chased when the 
young are sucklings. When a baby 
giraffe is caught, it will soon become 
very tame, if it can be made to eat; 
but often it will not take any kind of 
food, and dies in a few days. In 
menageries giraffes are fed on grain, 
Indian com, carrots, and hay. 

Sir Samuel Baker and other Afri¬ 
can travellers say that wild giraffes 
are far handsomer than those seen 
in menageries, the color of the skin 
changing its tints in different lights 
as the animal moves along. The 
eyes are large and more beautiful 
than those of the gazelle (see An¬ 
telope). The giraffe can see very 
far, and it has also a very strong 
scent, and can smell a man a great 
distance off if the wind happens to 
be blowing toward it. On this ac¬ 
count hunters find it very hard to get 
near enough to one to shoot it, and 
can do so only by creeping up 
against the wind behind grass and 
bushes. Even then the giraffe often 
spies the hunter and runs away, be¬ 
cause its neck is so tall that it can 
see over most bushes. 

The giraffe is a MAMMAL of the 
order ruminantia , or cud-chewing 
animals. 

The word giraffe is in Spanish 
girafa , which is from the Arabic 




GLASS 


270 


GLASS 


zirafah , meaning long-neck. The 
animal is sometimes called camelo¬ 
pard, from the Latin camelus , camel, 
and pardalis, panther, because it is 
like a camel in some things, and is 
spotted like a panther. 

GLASS. The things out of which 
glass is made are among the most 
common in nature. One of the prin¬ 
cipal non-metallic elements is sil¬ 
icon, which is found almost every¬ 
where mixed with OXYGEN, in which 
state it is called silicic acid or silica. 
It is really an acid, although a very 
weak one, for when heated red hot it 
will mix with ALKALIES or BASES 
to form SALTS, which are called sili¬ 
cates. Common glass is only a sili¬ 
cate of soda or of potash, that is, it 
is a mixture of silica with the alkalies 
or bases called soda and potash. 
By mixing some other things with 
these all the different kinds of glass 
are made. Silica is found in its 
purest form in rock crystals, some 
of which are almost as clear and 
bright as diamonds ; but all quartz, 
flint, sandstone, and sand are made 
of it. Formerly the silica for making 
glass was mostly got from flint, 
which was burned and ground to 
powder ; hence the name flint glass. 
But now pure white quartz sand is 
generally used, the best in the world 
being found in Berkshire County, 
Massachusetts. Soda is easily made 
from salt, and potash is found in all 
ashes. Lime, which is also a very 
common mineral, is put into glass to 
harden it; and oxide (see Oxygen) 
of lead to make it brilliant. Other 
oxides of metals are used to color 
glass : for instance, the oxide of iron 
gives it the green color seen in com¬ 
mon bottle glass. 

The different things used in mak¬ 
ing glass are carefully sifted and 
mixed together before melting. The 
mixture, which is a kind of coarse 
yellowish flour, called “ frit” or 
“ batch,” is melted in large pots set 
into a furnace. The furnaces, which 
are usually in the centre of the glass¬ 
house, are built of fire-proof bricks 


made out of clay and a CEMENT got 
by grinding up old pots or crucibles. 
The fire in the furnaces, in which 
coal is burned, is never put out until 
one is so worn that a new one has 
to be built, which is every year or 
two. Each furnace holds eight or 
ten pots, which are so placed upon 
stands that the fire can get all round 
them, and opposite each pot is a 
door, called a working-hole, through 
which the workman can fill it with 
frit, or take the melted glass out of 
it. The pots are made of the same 
clay as the furnace, and are of sev¬ 
eral shapes, of which two kinds are 
shown in the picture, Fig. 1. The 
one open at the top is used for melt¬ 
ing common glass, and that covered 
over, with an opening in front, for 
those glasses in which lead and other 
metals are used, and which need less 



Fig. 1.—Crucibles. 


heat. Common glass, which is 
made of only sand, soda, and lime, 
needs much more heat, because the 
frit will not melt unless the flame of 
the furnace can reach it. When the 
pots are set into the furnaces they 
are not taken out until they are used 
up. They last generally from one to 
two months. 

When all is ready, the frit, mixed 
with about one fourth its weight of 
broken flint glass, is thrown with a 
clean iron shovel into the pots through 
the furnace doors, which are then 
closed tight, and the fires are raised 
to a white heat, which melts little by 
little the contents of the pots into 
liquid glass ready for use. It usually 
takes twenty-four hours to melt a 
furnace full of glass pots. When it 
is done the heat is allowed to go 
down until the glass becomes about 








GLASS 


271 


GLASS 


as thick as paste, and it is kept in 
that state until it is all used up by 
the workmen, who labor day and 
night, six hours at a time. The 
principal tool used in working glass 
is the blowing-tube, an iron pipe 
about five feet long, one end of which 
is covered with wood so that the 
person using it may not burn his 
hands while the other end is red hot, 
wood being a non - conductor of 
heat. Besides this each workman 
has a solid iron rod called a ‘ ‘ punty, ’ ’ 
a pair of shears, a pair of spring 
tongs like sugar tongs to pick up 
pieces of hot glass, and several calli¬ 
pers and other small tools to shape 
with. The glass maker’s chair is a 


low wide bench with two arms, like 
those of a chair, on which he can 
roll his blowing-tube when he wishes 
to shape the hot glass at the end of 
it ; and the marver (from French 
marbre , marble, because it was 
formerly made of marble) is a smooth 
cast-iron slab, on which he can roll 
the hot glass to make it round. 

The method of blowing and of 
working will be best shown by telling 
how a wine glass is made. There 
are two ways of doing this, in one of 
which it is done entirely by the skill 
of the workman, while in the other 
he is aided by a mould or press. In 
the first process the workman takes 
out of the melting pot on the end of 


e_ 

<3>o 





d 

0 


-< Mis 

j Tv 

<Df 


[ 34 — 


Fig. 2.—Making a Wine Glass. 


his blowing-tube glass enough for 
one wine glass, as shown in the 
picture in a. Fig. 2. He then blows 
through his tube and makes a bubble 
of glass as in b, and after rolling it 
on the marver flattens its end with a 
wooden tool called a battledore, as 
in c. A lump of melted glass is next 
stuck on the flat end, as in d , and 
the workman gives it the form 
shown in e by rolling his blowing- 
tube over the arms of his bench and 
shaping the hot glass with a kind of 
shears called “ pucellas.” A little 
globe of glass is now fastened to the 
end of this and opened with the 
points of a tool, as in f, which makes 


it flat, as in g. A little hot glass is 
then taken up on the punty, by 
which it is stuck to the bottom of 
the wine glass, as in h y and the 
other end, to which the blow-pipe 
is still fastened, is cut off across 
the dotted line. The top is then 
trimmed with the shears, as in t, and 
the glass is finally finished as in j. 
It is then knocked off from the punty 
and carried by a boy on a forked rod 
to an oven, where it is heated with 
many others and then allowed to cool 
slowly. This process, which is called 
annealing (from Anglo-Saxon ancel- 
an ,to bake),tempers the glass, that is, 
makes it less brittle and apt to break. 





























GLASS 


272 


GLASS 


A common decanter is made in 
much the same way. A lump of 
glass is gathered on the end of the 
blowing-iron, as in a , Fig. 3. The 
workman blows it up a little and 
swings it round his head until it 
takes the shape b. More blowing 
and swinging make it larger and 
longer, when the end is flattened 
with the battledore, as in c. It is 
next made into the shape d, when 
it is stuck on to the punty at the flat 
end, and cracked off from the blow¬ 
ing-iron across the dotted line. The 
mouth is then heated in the furnace 
and shaped with tools. Another 
workman then takes some melted 
glass on the end of a punty and 
winds it round the neck to make a 


ring, as shown in e , and the first 
workman rolls the decanter round 
and round on the arms of his table 
and shapes each ring thus put on 
with a tool. Lastly, the neck is 
softened again in the furnace and 
the mouth and lips are finished, as 
shown in /. Such a decanter is a 
plain one, but many decanters are 
ground and beautifully ornament¬ 
ed. 

The second way of making drink¬ 
ing glasses and other small pieces of 
table ware is called pressing. The 
workman gathers a lump of glass on 
the end of his punty and drops it 
into a kind of mould shaped like the 
outside of the article to be made. A 
plunger, shaped like the inside of 




Fig. 3.—Making a Decanter. 


the article, is then pressed down 
into the hot glass, which is thus 
squeezed into the exact form wanted. 
A great many tumblers are made 
in this way. The little prisms, or 
three-cornered ornaments of glass 
which are often hung on chandeliers, 
are pressed between two brass dies, 
each of which makes one half the 
prism. One of the dies is fitted with 
little steel points which pierce the 
holes for the wires by which the 
prisms are fastened to each other. 

Glass-cutting. After wine glasses, 
goblets, tumblers, decanters, and 
other glass ware have been an¬ 
nealed, they are often cut. Glass¬ 
cutting is really grinding. The glass 
to be cut is first ground by being 


held against a cast-iron wheel which 
has a thin stream of sand and water 
dripping on it from a box above. 
The sand wears away the glass, but 
leaves rough marks. These are first 
smoothed out on a stone wheel wet 
with water, then on a willow-wood 
wheel covered with PUMICE and rot¬ 
ten stone, and finally polished on 
a wooden wheel with a soft powder 
called putty-powder, made of the 
rust (oxide) of tin and lead. Glass¬ 
engraving is done by wearing down 
the glass on very small wheels of 
iron, copper, or lead, covered with 
emery or some other powder, and 
made to turn round very fast in a 
lathe. Some glass is engraved by 
means of the SAND blast. 























GLASS 


273 


GLASS 


Window Glass. The making of 
window glass is one of the most 
important of glass manufactures. 
There are three kinds of it, crown 
glass, cylinder or sheet glass, and 
plate glass. Crown and cylinder 
glass are both made by blowing, but 
in different ways. In making crown 
glass the workman collects a lump 
of glass on his blowing-tube, and 
blows it into a hollow ball, as shown 
in a, Fig. 4. A boy now takes 
some melted glass on the end of a 
punty, and sticks it to the bottom of 
the ball. The workman then breaks 
off his blowing-iron, and the hollow 
ball, held up on the punty, takes the 
form b. It is then carried to the 
mouth of a furnace where it is turned 
round while the heat softens the 
glass. As the glass gets softer it is 
turned faster, the opening at the top 
slowly widens as in c , and the glass 
finally spreads out into a round flat 
plate, as in d. This plate, which is 
about five feet wide, is of equal thick¬ 
ness all over, excepting in the middle, 
where it is fastened to the punty, 
where there is a swelling called the 
“bull’s eye.” As the plate is very 
soft it would fold together if the 
workman stopped turning it, so he 
keeps up the motion until it is cool 
enough to retain its shape. It is 
then sent to the annealing oven, and 
when annealed is cut up into window 
panes. 



Fig. 4.—Making Crown Glass. 


In making cylinder or sheet glass 
the glass ball is blown up in the same 
way, and is then swung backward 
and forward, and finally entirely 
around over the workman’s head, 
until it takes first the shape a, Fig. 


5, and then the shape shown in b. 
It is next heated at the furnace until 
the end becomes soft. The work¬ 
man then closes the end of his blow¬ 
ing-tube so that the air cannot get 
out, and the heat swells the air in 
the inside of the glass and bursts out 
the end, as shown inc. The soft 



Fig. 5.—Making Cylinder Glass. 

edges of the opening are now worked 
out until they are straight with the 
sides of the cylinder, as shown in d. 
The cylinder is next laid on a rest, 
the blowing-pipe is broken off, and 
the workman wraps around the end 
where the pipe was fastened to it a 
thread of melted glass. In a few 
seconds he takes this off, and on 
touching his cold shears to the hot 
line made by it the end of the cylin¬ 
der cracks off as neatly as if it had 
been cut by a diamond. The cylin¬ 
der, which is now precisely like a 
common argand lamp chimney, only 
much larger, is then cut open with a 
diamond and spread out flat, after 
which it is annealed. 

Plate Glass is made in a wholly 
different way. The glass is dipped 
out of the melting pots into smaller 
ones called cisterns, which are so 
made that they can be hoisted out 
by means of a crane, and their 
contents emptied upon the casting 
table. This is a large thick iron 
table, made perfectly level and 
smooth. The melted glass is poured 
quickly over the table, being kept 
from running off the sides by long 
strips of metal, which are just as 
high as the thickness of the glass to 
be made. A heavy copper roller, 
















GLASS 


274 


GLASS 


whose ends rest on the strips, is then 
rolled over the glass, which spreads 
it out to the same thickness on all 
parts of the table. If there is too 
much glass, some of it runs over the 
edge and falls into water. As soon 
as the plate is cool enough to be 
moved it is put into the annealing 
oven, where it stays five days. 
When the plates are taken from the 
oven they are examined to see if they 
are fit for large plates ; if any are 
found with flaws in them, they are 
cut up into small plates. The plates 
are finally ground by rubbing two of 
them together, with sand and water, 
and are then polished bright with 
emery and water, and finally with 
felt rubbers. The largest window 
panes used in stores and the largest 
mirrors are made in this way. 

Colored Glass for windows is made 
either like crown glass or like cylinder 
glass. The colors are made by mix¬ 
ing oxides of metals (see Oxygen) 
with the other materials : thus, gold 
gives red tints from rose color to ruby 
and purple ; silver, yellow ; copper in 
one form a ruby red and in another 
emerald green ; cobalt, rich blues ; 
arsenic, pure white ; iron, dull 
green, etc. Sometimes, when the 
colors are too deep to let the light 
through, the glass is made clear on 
one side and colored on the other. 
This is easily done. The workman 
first gathers some clear glass on his 
blowing-iron, rolls it into shape on 
the marver, then dips it into a pot of 
melted colored glass, and finally 
blows it up and makes it into crown 
or sheet glass in the usual way. 
When finished the pane has only a 
thin skin of the colored glass on one 
side. Flint glass bottles, toilet-sets, 
and other vessels of plain glass are 
often colored on the outside in this 
way, and then ornamented with beau¬ 
tiful patterns by cutting through the 
colored layer by grinding on wheels 
so that the clear glass underneath 
shows through. 

Stained Glass, seen mostly in 
church windows, is made by painting 


the surface of clear glass with various 
materials,chiefly the oxides of metals, 
mixed usually with oil of turpentine. 
The pictures are painted with brushes 
like oil paintings ; the glass is then 
heated red hot in a furnace until the 
colors become stained into it. By 
this means a complete picture can be 
made on one large pane of glass, 
which in old times was made up of a 
great number of small pieces set in 
lead frames. 

History of Glass. The Roman 
writer Pliny says that glass was first 
found out by some Phoenician sailors, 
whose ship was driven ashore at the 
mouth of the river Belus, in Syria. 
As the sea was very rough they 
cooked their dinner on the beach, and 
finding no stones to rest their pots 
on they put under them some pieces 
of nitrum (supposed to be soda), 
with which their vessel was laden. 
This and the sand, melted by the 
heat of the fire, ran together and 
made glass, which the sailors were 
surprised to find among the ashes. 
As it would take a much stronger 
heat than could be got from an open 
fire to melt glass, this story is hardly 
to be believed. But there is no doubt 
that the Phoenicians knew how to 
make fine glass, which they cut, en¬ 
graved, gilded, and stained of the 
most beautiful colors. They prob¬ 
ably learned the art from the Egyp¬ 
tians, who made glass at least three 
thousand years before Christ. In 
some of the tombs near ancient 
Thebes are still to be seen pictures 
of workmen blowing glass in the 
same way in which it is blown to-day. 
The Greeks knew how to make very 
beautiful glass, and a large number 
of ancient cups, bottles, vases, and 
urns, of many shapes and colors, 
found in tombs in the island of Cy¬ 
prus by General di Cesnola, are now 
in the Metropolitan Museum of New 
York. The making of glass was not 
carried on in Rome until about the 
first century before Christ. Beau¬ 
tiful specimens of Roman glass have 
been found in Pompeii and Hercu- 





GLOVE 


275 


GLUTEN 


laneum, and it is known that many 
of the principal houses in those cities 
had glass windows. After Rome 
was destroyed by the barbarians, the 
art of fine glass-making was nearly 
lost, and only churches and public 
buildings had glass windows. For a 
long time the Venetians made the 
best glass in Europe, and it is prob¬ 
able that they first made glass mir¬ 
rors. Three hundred years ago glass 
windows were so rare in houses in 
England that only castles and houses 
of the rich had them, and the win¬ 
dow frames were often taken out and 
packed away for safe keeping when 
the family were not at home. 

The word glass is from the Anglo- 
Saxon glas. 

CLOVE, a covering for the hand, 
differing from the mitten in having a 
sheath for each finger. Gloves are 
made of worsted, cotton, silk, India- 
rubber, and different kinds of skins. 
Those made of threads are woven on 
machines ; skin gloves are cut out 
and sewed together. The finest kid 
gloves are made from the skins of 
kids, but many of the cheaper kinds 
are made of lamb, rat, and other thin 
skins. The skins are first prepared 
and dyed with great care. The 
different pieces for the glove are cut 
out with punches, which make at the 
same time the little holes for the 
stitches along the edge of each. 
The two edges to be sewed together 
are then placed in the jaws of a vise, 
having fine teeth like those of a 
comb, through which the needle is 
passed so as to make the stitches 
even. When sewn, the gloves are 
beaten in a damp linen cloth to soften 
them, and then pressed. Fine gloves 
of dogskin and other heavy skins are 
made in England ; and good buck¬ 
skin gloves and some kid ones are 
made in the United States. 

Gloves have been worn by almost 
all nations from the most ancient 
times. In the middle ages they were 
a costly part of the dress both of men 
and women, and were often richly 
embroidered and ornamented with 


precious stones. It was customary 
for a knight who had won a lady’s 
favor to wear her glove in his helmet, 
and in those times the throwing down 
of a glove was the common way of 
inviting a person to fight a duel. 

The word glove is from the Anglo- 
Saxon glof . The Germans call a 
glove handschuh, hand-shoe. 

GLUE, a coarse kind of gela¬ 
tine, used as a cement for sticking 
things together. It is made usually 
from the parings of hoofs and hides 
from tanners’ and furriers’ shops, 
and the clippings of hoofs, ears, and 
tails from slaughter-houses. These 
are cleansed by soaking in lime-water 
and boiled in a large network bag 
until all the gelatine is out of them. 
The liquor is then drawn off and 
fined or clarified, when it is cooled to 
a jelly, which, while still soft, is cut 
with a spade into square pieces. 
These are next cut with a brass wire 
into thin slices, which are dried in 
the open air and afterward by stove 
heat. 

The contents of the bag are boiled 
a second and a third time to make 
size, a kind of thin glue used by paint¬ 
ers, paper-hangers, and plasterers, 
and the scraps are sold for man¬ 
ure. 

The word glue is from the Latin 
gluten , glue or paste. 

GLUTEN, a tough, sticky, glue¬ 
like substance, found in wheat and 
most other grains. If wheat flour 
dough be worked in a cloth in running 
water until the water is no longer 
whitened by it, that is, until all the 
starch is washed out, what is left 
in the cloth will be called gluten. It 
is this which gives firmness to 
bread ; if wheat flour were all starch 
and had no gluten in it, bread made 
from it would crumble to pieces. It 
is this also which makes wheat bread 
lighter and more spongy than bread 
made of rye flour, which has less 
gluten in it: the carbonic acid gas, 
which is formed when the yeast 
works in the dough, is caught in the 
gluten and swells it up in little bub- 




GLYCERINE 


276 


GOLD 


bles, and these puff up the whole 
mass. 

Gluten, like starch, contains CAR¬ 
BON, oxygen, and hydrogen, but 
it also has in it another ELEMENT, 
NITROGEN, which starch does not 
have. This is an important differ¬ 
ence, and makes gluten very val¬ 
uable as a food. All the grains 
used for food have more or less 
gluten in them. Wheat, rye, oats, 
barley, and corn have a good deal in 
them, but rice has but little, and is 
therefore not so rich a food as the 
others. The bran of wheat and of 
most other grains has more gluten in 
it than the inside of the grain ; hence 
when flour is bolted or sifted very 
fine and white, it is not so good for 
food as that made from the whole 
grain. 

The word gluten is Latin, and 
means glue or paste. 

GLYCERINE, a sweetish liquid, 
without color or smell, got from 
many fats and oils. Glycerine has 
many uses in the arts. It will keep 
meats, fruits, and flowers from de¬ 
caying, and natural-history speci¬ 
mens are often preserved in it. If 
a little of it be put into ink, the ink 
will stay damp for a long time so that 
a copy may be taken from it. As it 
does not freeze easily, it is added to 
the water in GAS metres. In medi¬ 
cine it is used to dissolve drugs in, 
and is put on the skin when scalded 
or burned. The Russians rub it on 
the face in cold weather to protect it 
from frost bites ; a little glycerine put 
into suds for blowing soap-bubbles 
will make the bubbles better and 
brighter. 

When mixed with nitric and sul¬ 
phuric acid, glycerine becomes the 
terrible explosive compound called 
Nitro*Glycerine, which is much 
stronger than gunpowder. It is 
used for blasting in mines, quarries, 
and tunnels. 

The word glycerine is made from 
the Greek glukus, sweet. 

GNEISS. See Granite. 

GNU. See Antelope. 


GOAT. The goat is like the sheep 
in many things, but is stronger, 
spryer, and less timid. It has a 
beard, too, which is wanting in the 
sheep, and its horns are usually 
longer and straighter than those of 
the sheep. Goats are very useful to 
mankind. Their flesh is good, that 
of young kids being considered a 
great delicacy, and their milk is very 
rich, and easier to digest than that of 
the cow. For this reason it is often 
drunk by invalids, and is given to 
babies, especially in Ireland, where 
babies sometimes take it directly 
from the goat. Good butter and 
cheese are made from it in some coun¬ 
tries. Goats give generally about 
two quarts of milk a day, but some 
give three or four. 

The skins of kids are made into 
kid GLOVES, and the skins of goats 
furnish the best MOROCCO. The 
hair of the goat is made into a great 
number of articles, among the most 
valuable of which are CASHMERE 
shawls. From the hair of white 
goats are made the large wigs worn 
by judges in England. Goat’s horns 
are made into knife handles, and the 
fat of goats makes excellent candles. 
Goats are also much used for draw¬ 
ing children’s carriages, and may 
easily be trained to mind the rein. 

Goats are found all over the world, 
in all climates. Among the most 
valuable kinds are the Cashmere goat 
of Thibet, which has long, straight, 
fine hair ; the Angora goat of Asia 
Minor, whose hair is also fine and 
silky, but is curly and shorter than 
that of the Cashmere goat ; and 
the Syrian goat. The Rocky Moun¬ 
tain goat is an ANTELOPE. 

The goat is a MAMMAL of the 
order rwninantia, or cud-chewing 
animals. 

The word goat is from the Anglo- 
Saxon^/, goat. 

GOLD, a METAL and one of the 
elements. Gold is not only one 
of the most precious, but is also one 
of the most beautiful and most use¬ 
ful of the metals. It is the only yel- 




GOLD 


277 


GOLD 


low metal, and is the most lasting, 
the most easily worked, the most 
malleable or easy to be hammered 
out, and the most ductile or easy to 
be drawn out of all the metals. It 
is also one of the few metals found 
pure. 

Gold is found almost everywhere, 
but is not plentiful enough in all 
places to pay for the labor of getting 
it. Sea water has gold in it, and it 
is said that there is more in the 
waters of the ocean than has yet 
been taken out of the earth. Gold is 
found in many kinds of rocks, but 
chiefly in QUARTZ. By the crumb¬ 
ling away of rocks by frost and rain, 
grains of gold are washed down into 
the valleys and river beds ; and thus 
have been found the rich deposits 
called placers in the gravel and sands 
of streams. Gold in placers comes in 
dust, scales, grains, and lumps, 
some worn round, and others bear¬ 
ing the marks of the rocks in which 
they were once bedded. As gold is 
heavier than sand and gravel, it 
usually works its way down until it 
reaches the rock underneath it, 
where it settles in the holes in its 
surface, called pockets. In placer 
mining, the top soil is usually dug 
away down to the rock, where the 
largest lumps of gold are found in 
the pockets ; but all the upper soil is 
carefully washed and searched so 
that even the little scales and grains 
may be saved. Large lumps are 
called nuggets (from an old word 
nigot, changed from ingot). They 
are sometimes found as large as a 
man’s head, and one dug in Austra¬ 
lia weighed 233 pounds. 

The gold found in rocks is usually 
smaller than that dug from placers, 
and it takes much more labor to get 
it out. The rock must first be 
blasted out, and if it is underground 
has to be raised to the surface. It 
must then be crushed to powder in 
a stamping mill, and thoroughly 
washed with water. The washing 
is done in different ways, but gen¬ 
erally by means of a series of sieves 


to separate the larger from the small¬ 
er particles, and of a slanting table 
over which a stream of water flows. 
The quartz grains and other earthy 
matter are washed away, and the 
gold grains, which are heavier, re¬ 
main at the head of the table. When 
the gold dust is very fine, it is sepa¬ 
rated by a process called amalgama¬ 
tion. An amalgam is made by mix¬ 
ing the fine dust with MERCURY or 
quicksilver, which has the power of 
seizing upon all the little grains of 
gold and uniting with them. The 
mercury is afterward separated from 
the gold, which is thus got pure. 

Gold is found in Europe chiefly in 
Hungary and Transylvania, where 
it is washed from the sands of riv¬ 
ers ; in Asia mostly in Siberia, in the 
Ural and Altai Mountains, where it 
is found in sand and gravel and in 
rocks ; and in Africa in Abyssinia, 
on the Gold Coast, and from the 
sands of several rivers. In America 
Brazil was formerly the richest in 
gold, but the mines of the United 
States are now the most valuable 
in the world. California and Mon¬ 
tana furnish the most gold, but 
much is also mined in many of the 
other States and territories. Next 
to the United States Australia gives 
the most gold. 

Gold when pure is nearly as soft 
as lead, and is therefore unfit to be 
used either for coin or for jewelry 
until it has been hardened by mix¬ 
ing it with some other metal. (See 
Alloy.) Copper is mostly used for 
this, because it does not change the 
color much, except to make it a lit¬ 
tle redder. In the United States and 
France gold coins are made of nine 
parts of gold and one part of cop¬ 
per, and in Great Britain of eleven 
parts of gold and one of copper. 
The red gold of jewellers is made 
up of three parts of gold and one 
part of copper. By mixing gold 
with silver jewellers lighten the color 
of gold, and give it a greenish shade, 
and by mixing it with iron give it a 
bluish shade. The alloys of gold 





GOLDFISH 


278 


GOLD LACE 


with copper and silver are not only 
harder than pure gold, and thus 
wear better, but they will also melt 
easier. 

Jewellers mark the fineness or the 
purity of any alloy of gold by sup¬ 
posing it to be divided into twenty- 
four equal parts called carats, its 
fineness being according to the num¬ 
ber of parts of pure gold in these 
twenty-four parts. For instance, 
gold 18 carats fine has in it eighteen 
parts of pure gold and six parts of 
other metal. Jewellers commonly 
spell this word karat , and mark gold 
with a K and the figures marking 
the number of carats. Thus gold 
of 18 carats is usually marked K 18. 

Gold may be hammered out into 
leaves so thin that 200,000 of them 
piled up will not be more than an 
inch high (see Gold Leaf) ; and a 
single grain of it may be drawn out 
into a wire 500 feet long. On this 
account gold is one of the most use¬ 
ful metals employed in the arts, for 
articles covered with a thin coating 
of it are as beautiful as pure gold it¬ 
self. Other metals, stone, porce¬ 
lain, glass, wood, ivory, silk, paper, 
and many other substances, may 
easily be gilded in different ways. 
(See Book, Button, Metal 
Work, Pottery.) 

Gold will not mix directly with 
oxygen, that is, it will not rust; it 
is therefore one of the most lasting 
of all the metals. It is not eaten by 
any of the common acids, but is 
easily dissolved by a mixture called 
aqua regia (royal water, because it 
dissolves the king of metals), made 
of one part of nitric acid and four 
parts of hydrochloric or muriatic 
ACID. 

The word gold is Anglo-Saxon. 

GOLDFISH. This fish, sometimes 
called golden carp, was first 
brought from China, but it is now 
common in Europe and the United 
States. When full grown it is bright 
orange above, lighter on the sides 
and whitish below ; but when young 
its color is dark, and when old it 


fades to a silvery white. In China 
goldfish are kept as pets in almost 
every house, either in open porcelain 
vessels or in little ponds. In this 
country many are kept in glass 
globes, but these are very poor dwell¬ 
ings for them. Fish need a great 
deal of air, and but little can get to 
the water in a globe. They also need 
shade sometimes, and when in a 
glass globe they are always in a blaze 
of light. The water in a globe, too, 
should be changed often, else the 
fish will not be healthy, and as they 
have to be lifted out, either by hand 
or with a small net, when this is 
done, they are apt to be injured. 
But if you wish to keep them in a 
globe, get one with as wide a mouth 
as possible, and do not fill it more 
than three-fourths full of water, so 
that enough air can get to it. Keep 
it in the most airy part of the room, 
and never set it in the sun or near 
the fire. Never feed the fish, as 
they will get enough food from the 
animalcules in the water, which 
must be changed every day. Do 
not give them any bread ; goldfish 
are often killed by being fed with 
bread, which sours in the water and 
makes it unfit for them to live in. 

It is far better to keep goldfish in 
the basins of fountains or in small 
ponds, where they will have plenty 
of room. They will become very 
tame, and may be taught to come to 
the surface at the sound of a bell. 
When protected from other fish, 
which eat both their spawn or eggs 
and their young, they will increase 
very fast. They are found now in 
the Hudson and other rivers, and in 
many lakes and ponds in New York 
and New England. 

The goldfish belongs to the same 
family with the sucker and the 
carp. It gets its name from its 
color. 

GOLD LACE, lace or braids 
made by weaving gilded silken 
threads. To make the threads, a sil¬ 
ver rod is gilded with GOLD leaf by 
laying the leaf on it and rubbing it 





GOLD LEAF 


279 


GOLD LEAF 


until it is all covered. The rod is 
then drawn into wire so fine that 
one ounce of it is more than a mile 
long. It is then flattened between 
steel rollers. The film of gold on 
the silver is much thinner than gold 
leaf, but covers the silver so perfectly 
that it looks like gold. This fine flat 
wire is now twisted by means of a 
small machine around threads of 
yellow silk made for the purpose, so 
that when finished they look like 
gold threads ; and out of this gilded 
silk are made gold lace, gold braid, 
epaulets, etc. 

The word gold is Anglo-Saxon. 
Lace is from the Latin laqueus, a net. 

COLD LEAF, gold hammered into 
a thin leaf to be used for gilding. 
The process is called gold-beating, 
and the workman who does it a 
gold-beater. The gold used is either 
pure or mixed with various parts of 
copper or silver, according to the 
color, of which there are a dozen 
different shades. The metal is first 
melted and cast into flat oblong 
pieces called ingots. The ingot is 
then flattened out by rolling between 
steel rollers until it is so thin that it 
would take 800 of them piled up to 
make an inch in height. This is 
next cut up into pieces an inch 
square, and 150 of these are piled 
together with a small sheet of parch¬ 
ment, or a kind of paper made for 
the purpose, between each, and put 
into a parchment case. The gold¬ 
beater now hammers this with a 
heavy hammer until the inch pieces 
are spread out into pieces four inches 
square. Each of these is then cut 
again into four parts, so as to make 
600 pieces, each two inches square, 
and all are again packed up, this 
time with gold-beater’s skin between 
the leaves. Gold-beater’s skin is 
made of the large intestine or gut of 
the ox, and is prepared with great 
care. The pile is beaten as before, 
but with a lighter hammer, and is 
then cut again, making the 600 
pieces into 2400 pieces. These are 
separated into three packets of 800 


each, and again beaten between 
leaves of gold-beater’s skin for four 
hours with a still lighter hammer, 
when each leaf is spread out so thin 
that it would take more than 200,- 
000 of them piled up to make an 
inch in height. The leaves are 
then cut square and put between the 
leaves of little books, twenty-five in 
each book, the paper of which has 
been rubbed with red chalk to keep 
the gold from sticking to it, and are 
ready for use. Silver and copper 
leaf are made in nearly the same 
way, but they are both a little 
thicker than gold leaf, because 
those metals are not so malleable 
(Latin malleus , a hammer) as gold. 
As pure silver leaf would be apt to 
turn black in the air, it is always 
made of part gold and part silver. 
Gold beaten out but once between 
leaves of parchment is called den¬ 
tist’s gold, and is used for stopping 
teeth. 

Wood, plaster, papier-machd, and 
many other substances may be gild¬ 
ed by covering them with gold leaf 
stuck on with a kind of sizing or 
glue. The gold leaf is not put on 
the wood, plaster, etc., itself, but 
on a mixture of whiting and glue 
called size. In gilding picture-frames, 
for example, the wood is painted 
with four or five coats of size put 
on hot. This is carefully smoothed, 
when dry, with pumice stone and fine 
sand-paper, and another size, made 
of clay, red chalk, black lead, suet, 
etc., is then put on. This, which 
is called gold size, is the ground¬ 
work for the gold leaf. The leaf is 
laid on with great care, so as to cover 
the whole surface, pressed with cot¬ 
ton wool into all the parts, and after¬ 
ward smoothed with a brush. When 
dry, the gilding, or any part of it, may 
be burnished or polished bright by 
rubbing it with smooth agates set in 
handles for the purpose. The parts 
to be left dull are not burnished. 
In gilding on metals or on surfaces 
to be much in the open air an oil 
size is used. (See Book.) 




GOOSE 


280 


GOURD 


The words gold and leaf are 
Anglo-Saxon. 

GOOSE. There are several kinds 
of wild geese in the United States, 
but the most common one is the 
Canada goose. These geese spend 
the summer in the cool parts of Brit¬ 
ish America, and the winter in the 
Southern States and South America. 
They may often be seen flying high, 
irT regular order, going northward 
in March and April, and southward 
in September, and crying honk / 
honk. They usually come down to 
feed at night. Wild geese are of a 
dull gray, with head, neck, bill, tail, 
legs, and feet black. Their flesh 
and eggs are excellent for food, their 
feathers are valuable for beds, and 
their quills for pens. They are 
easily tamed, and are often kept with 
domestic geese. 

The Barnacle Goose, common in 
northern Europe, is so called be¬ 
cause it was believed in old times 
that it came from a kind of shell fish 
called the barnacle. Some of the 
early writers say that little goslings 
could be seen at certain seasons of 
the year flying out of the shells. 
Others said that they came out of 
decayed wood, and so this kind of 
goose was called tree goose by 
some. These silly stories were be¬ 
lieved less than three hundred years 
ago. 

The Common Goose kept on 
farms is supposed to have sprung 
from the wild goose of Europe, 
which is a gray bird with a yellow 
bill. The ganders among tame 
geese are usually white, and the fe¬ 
males gray. Before steel pens were 
made, geese were largely raised in 
England and in Germany for their 
quills, which were plucked several 
time a year; and many are still 
raised for their feathers and for eat¬ 
ing. By shutting geese up in cages 
so that they cannot move, keeping 
them very warm, and feeding them 
on fattening food, they soon become 
loaded with fat, and their livers 
greatly enlarged. From these fat liv¬ 


ers, which are really diseased, are 
made the famous Strasburg pies or 
pdtfc de foie gras (French, patties 
of fat liver), which are made in Ger¬ 
many and France and sent all over 
the world. The gizzards, heads, 
and legs of geese are called giblets, 
and are sold in sets for pies. 

We often hear people say, “ As 
silly as a goose,” but the goose is 
by no means a silly bird, not nearly 
so silly as the ostrich. Geese are 
very sensible birds, and when treated 
well they behave as well as any 
other fowls. They tell a story in 
Germany of a gander that used to 
lead a poor blind woman to church 
every Sunday. It would take hold 
of her gown with its bill and lead 
her across the fields and through the 
village, and when it saw her safely 
seated would go into the church¬ 
yard and feed until service was over, 
when it would lead her back home 
again. That certainly was not a 
silly goose. 

The goose belongs to the order 
natatores, or swimming birds, and 
to the duck family. 

The word goose is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon gos, goose. 

GOOSEBERRY. There are sev¬ 
eral wild kinds of gooseberry in the 
United States. The common wild 
gooseberry has large berries covered 
with prickles. It is found in north¬ 
ern parts of the country, from the 
Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. 
The swamp gooseberry, which 
bears dark purple sourish fruit, is 
common in New England and New 
York. The gooseberries sold in 
market are cultivated kinds called 
seedlings, because they were first 
raised from the seed of wild ones. 
They are almost always sold green. 

The word gooseberry is from 
gossberry or gorseberry, and the 
plant is so named because it has 
prickles like the shrub called goss or 
gorse. 

GOUGE. See Chisel. 

GOURD, a family of plants to 
which belong the pumpkin, 




GRAFT 


281 


GRANITE 


SQUASH, CUCUMBER, MELON, and 
others. The common or bottle 
gourd, sometimes called the cala¬ 
bash gourd, which grows wild in 
Asia and Africa, bears a fruit shaped 
like a water-bottle, the rind of which 
is very hard when dry. These 
gourds make good bottles, dippers, 
funnels, and small dishes. 

The w r ord gourd is from the 
French gourde, a swelling. 

GRAFT, a small shoot of a plant 
or tree made to grow in another 
plant or tree, so that the two unite 
and become one. The shoot is 
called a graft or scion, the plant in 
which it is set a stock, and the pro¬ 
cess grafting. Grafting is one of the 
most important parts of the fruit¬ 
grower’s business. When the seeds 
of a valuable kind of fruit are 
planted, it is but seldom that the 
plants raised from them bear as 
good fruit as the parent; almost all 
are poorer, but sometimes it happens 
that one is better. When this oc¬ 
curs, the fruit-grower naturally 
wishes to get as many trees of the 
kind as possible. This he does by 
cutting off shoots from the new one 
and grafting them into the trunks 
or branches of other trees of the same 


kind which bear poorer fruit. The 
graft thus set on to another trunk 
will soon grow to it and 
spread out into branches, 
and will bear the same 
kind of fruit as the tree 
from which it was cut. 
Ornamental shrubs and 
many kinds of flowering 
plants may also be grafted. 

There are several kinds 
of grafting. In cleft graft¬ 
ing the graft is sharpened 
Fig. 1.— ^ke a wedge and set into 
Cleft a split in the stock, so 
Grafting, that its bark joins that 
of the stock, as shown 
in the picture, Fig. 1. In whip, 
tongue, or splice grafting the parts 
are cut so as to fit together in differ¬ 
ent ways, as shown in Fig 2. An¬ 
other kind of grafting is called bud¬ 



ding. In this the bark of the stock 
is cut across with a knife and then 
slit downward from this cut, as in 



Fig. 2.—Tongue Grafting. 


Fig. 3, so that the bark can be raised 
up. A bud of the present year’s 
growth is then cut out of the tree to 
be grafted and is set under the bark 
of the stock, just as if it had grown 
there. In all kinds of grafting the 
parts cut are usually 
covered over with 
grafting wax or some¬ 
thing else, and wound 
with a bandage to 
keep out the air and 
wet until the parts 
grow together. 

The word graft is 
from the old English 
graff , which is from 
the Latin graphium, 

Greek grapheion , a 
pencil, because a graft is sharpened 
like a pencil. 

GRANITE, a kind of rock made 
up of grains of FELDSPAR and 
quartz, with sometimes mica in 
it. When it has HORNBLENDE in 
it instead of mica, it is called syenite 
(from Syene, in Upper Egypt, 
where it was quarried in ancient 
times). When feldspar, quartz, 
and mica are so mixed that the 
stone will split easily into coarse 
slabs or flags, it is called gneiss. 
When such stone has hornblende in 
it instead of mica, it is called syen- 
itic gneiss. Granite is usually gray, 
grayish-white, or flesh color; sy¬ 
enite is red, or red mottled with dark 
green or black by the hornblende. 



Fig. 3-— 
Budding. 













GRAPE 


282 


GRASSHOPPER 


Granite is prized for its hardness, 
strength, and power of resisting the 
weather. It is, therefore, a very 
valuable stone and is much used in 
public buildings, in making docks, 
paving streets, etc. 

The word granite is from the Latin 
granum , grain, and the stone is so 
called because it is made up of 
grains. 

GRAPE, the fruit of the vine. 
Grapes grow in mild climates all 
over the world. In America there 
are four wild kinds : the northern 
fox grape, the southern fox grape or 
muscadine, the summer grape, and 
the frost grape. The different cul¬ 
tivated grapes in the United States, 
such as the Isabella, Catawba, etc., 
are supposed to have mostly come 
from some of these four kinds ; but 
a few kinds have been made by 
grafting foreign grapes on Ameri¬ 
can stocks. (See Graft.) 

In all American grapes the soft 
pulp will easily slip out of the skin, 
but grapes which grow in Europe 
may be broken open right through 
the pulp, so that the seeds can be 
picked out. In this country foreign 
grapes are raised in cold graperies 
covered with glass, or in hot-houses, 
but only the home kinds are usually 
grown in the open air. In Califor¬ 
nia, however, the foreign kinds do 
well out of doors. Grapes are raised 
chiefly for making wine, although 
many kinds are used for eating and 
for making raisins. 

The principal wine-making coun¬ 
tries in Europe are France, Italy, 
Spain, Portugal, and Germany, 
where large tracts of land are cov¬ 
ered with vineyards. In France and 
along the Rhine the vines are cut 
down into small bushes and tied up 
to stakes, but in Italy they are 
trained over elm and poplar trees 
and are allowed to run from branch 
to branch. Many grapes are also 
raised for wine-making in the Ma¬ 
deira, Azores, and Canary islands, 
and some at the Cape of Good Hope. 
The grapes raised in Greece, the 


Ionian islands, and Asia Minor are 
mostly made into raisins. 

A great many kinds of grapes are 
now raised in the United States, 
both for table use and for wine¬ 
making. 

The word grape is in French 
grappe , and in Italian grappo . Vine 
is from the Latin vitis , grape vine. 

GRASS, a large family of plants, 
including besides all the kinds used 
for making hay, wheat, barley, 
rye, oats, Indian corn, rice, 
SUGAR-cane, BAMBOO, and many 
reeds and canes. Although some of 
these are very small, and some, like 
the bamboos, grow as high as great 
trees, they are all alike in having 
jointed stems, sometimes solid, but 
usually hollow, and closed at the 
joints. The uses of the various 
grasses are very numerous and im¬ 
portant. Among the things which 
we get from them are FLOUR and 
MEAL, STARCH, and GLUTEN ; 
sugar and molasses, beer, whis¬ 
key, rum, and other liquors ; PAPER 
and pasteboard, and all the many 
other things which are made from 
the different kinds of straw. 

What is commonly called grass 
includes only the kinds which fur¬ 
nish herbage for cattle and horses, 
and which are made into hay. Clo¬ 
ver is not a grass, although farmers 
sometimes call it so. Of the grasses 
used for hay, the most valuable are 
timothy, called herd’s grass in New 
York and New England ; red top, 
called herd’s grass in the States 
south of New York; orchard 
grass, and Kentucky blue grass, 
called also June grass. Some kinds 
of grasses are raised for ornament, 
on account of the beauty of their 
leaves and flowers. Striped leaved 
grasses look very pretty in gardens, 
and some dried grasses make beau¬ 
tiful bouquets. 

The word grass is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon gras. 

GRASSHOPPER. Most grass¬ 
hoppers are green, much like the 
leaves and grasses on which they 




GRASSHOPPER 


283 


GRAVEL 


feed. They do not live together and 
travel in great swarms as the locusts 
do, but stay mostly in one place, 
and they are more active by night 
than by day. Their hinder legs are 
so long that they cannot walk, but 
move by leaps or hops. Their 
wings are quite large, but they make 
only short flights. The males make 
a shrill sound with their wings. 
The females have a sharp piercer at 
the end.of the body, with which they 
make holes in the ground to lay 
their eggs in. The eggs, which are 
numerous, are covered with a shiny 
film or skin. They lie in the earth 
all winter, and are not hatched un¬ 
til spring. When the young grass¬ 
hopper comes out it has no wings, 


so that it can only hop about by 
means of its long hind legs. But 
soon, after it has shed its skin sev¬ 
eral times, its wings begin to grow. 
After it has reached its growth, it 
flies around as a perfect grasshopper 
for only about a month, and then 
shrivels up and dies. In the picture 
a shows the young grasshopper in 
his first state of being ; b , when his 
wings begin to grow ; and c the 
full-grown grasshopper. Grass¬ 
hoppers would be very harmful to 
vegetation if they were not kept 
down by birds, turkeys, and other 
common fowls, mud wasps, and 
other insects, to whom they furnish 
much food. The insects called grass¬ 
hoppers in the West, which do so 



Changes of the Grasshopper. 
a , Larva; b, Pupa ; c, Perfect Insect. 


much damage by eating up the 
crops, are not grasshoppers but 
LOCUSTS. 

Katydids are a kind of grasshop¬ 
pers which live mostly on trees and 
shrubs. They lay their eggs in two 
rows of eight or nine each, on the 
twigs of trees, scraping off the bark 
and fastening them on with a kind 
of gum. Only the male katydid 
makes the sound which gives these 
insects their name, with its wings ; 
the female makes no noise. The 
katydid makes a pretty pet for the 
few weeks of its life. It should be 
fed on fruit. The Indians of the 
West, where these insects abound, 
call them “grasshopper birds;” 


they roast and grind them into 
flour, and make cakes of them. 

The grasshopper belongs to the 
order neuroptera , or nerve-winged 
INSECTS. 

The word grasshopper is made 
up of grass, Anglo-Saxon gras, and 
hop, Anglo-Saxon hoppari. 

GRAVEL, small stones or pebbles, 
often intermixed with sand. It lies 
usually in deep beds under the soil, 
and in the beds and banks of rivers, 
but sometimes forms large hills. 
Gravel is made by the breaking and 
wearing down of larger ROCKS, 
mostly by the action of water. It is 
much used for ballasting railway 
tracks, that is, filling in the spaces 








GRINDSTONE 


284 


GUINEA FOWL 


between the ties, for covering walks, 
and for making concrete and artifi¬ 
cial stone. 

The word gravel is from the old 
French gravele, gravel. 

GRINDSTONE, a round, flat stone 
used for grinding or sharpening 
tools. They are made mostly of 
sandstone, are of different width and 
thickness, and are made to turn 
round, some very fast and some 
slowly, according to the work to be 
done. In mills they are turned usu¬ 
ally by steam or water power. Steel 
goods, such as knives, forks, scis¬ 
sors, needles, razors, etc., are first 
forged into shape and then ground 
smooth on grindstones. Most of the 
grinding is done on dry stones, and 
the fine steel dust which rises makes 
the business of the grinder very un¬ 
healthful. Coarse steel goods are 
ground on stones wet with water. 
Glass lenses for spy glasses, opera 
glasses, and telescopes are also 
ground down on stones. 

The word grindstone is made up 
of grind, from Anglo-Saxon grtndan, 
and stone, from Anglo-Saxon stan. 

CROUSE. Among the birds right¬ 
ly called grouse are the pheasant¬ 
tailed grouse or cock of the plains, 
the pinnated grouse, commonly call¬ 
ed the prairie hen or chicken, and 
the ruffed grouse, called partridge in 
New England and pheasant in the 
Middle States. The cock of the 
plains is found only in the far West. 
It is the largest of the American 
grouse, being often as large as a 
turkey. 

The Prairie Hen was once common 
in New York and other Atlantic 
States, but is now seldom found any¬ 
where but in the prairies of the 
West. It lives on berries, grains, 
acorns, etc., and is much prized 
for food. Great numbers of them 
are shot or taken in nets and traps 
every autumn and sent to the East¬ 
ern markets. 

The Ruffed Grouse, or partridge, 
is found in Canada and most of the 
Northern States. It lives mostly in 


thick woods and is seen generally in 
pairs. The males make a kind of a 
drumming sound by beating the air 
with their wings. The females lay 
nine to fifteen brownish-white eggs, 
usually in May. When partridges fly 
their wings make a loud whirring 
noise. In the autumn they live 
largely on partridge berries, which 
give their flesh a fine flavor, and 
they are therefore much hunted in 
that season. 

The grouse belongs to the order 
rasores , or scratching BIRDS. 

The word grouse is supposed by 
some to come from gorse, heath. 

GUINEA FOWL. This bird gets 
its name from Guinea, Africa, from 
whence the first of these fowls were 
brought. It is sometimes called 
Guinea hen, and sometimes pintado 
(Spanish, painted). In Africa, in 
which country only they are found 
wild, they live in large flocks in 
woods along the banks of rivers, 
where they feed on seeds, grains, 
and insects. The common Guinea 
fowl is about as large as the domestic 
fowl, and is usually slate-colored or 
dark gray, covered with round white 
spots. The cock and hen are so 
much alike that it is hard to tell them 
apart. Guinea fowls are noisy and 
quarrelsome, will fight other kinds 
of fowls, and are apt to injure tender 
buds and flowers, so they are not 
very pleasant to keep as pets. They 
lay yellowish - white eggs, a little 
smaller than common hens’ eggs, 
and covered with brown specks. 
They do not like to sit, and they 
make poor mothers, so it is best to 
hatch their eggs under common hens. 
The chicks, which come out of the 
shell in three weeks, are very tender, 
and a whole brood will often die dur¬ 
ing a cold storm. The flesh of 
Guinea fowls is of fine flavor, and 
their eggs are very good. 

The Guinea fowl belongs to the 
order rasores, or scratching BIRDS, 
and to the pheasant family, in which 
are also common fowls, turkeys, and 
peacocks. 





GUINEA PIG 


285 


GULL 


GUINEA PIG. This little animal 
is found only in South America. Its 
common name Guinea is probably a 
mistake for Guiana, in South Amer¬ 
ica, and it is called a pig because it 
grunts something like one. It looks 
more like a rabbit than a pig. 
Guinea pigs have short glossy fur, 
usually dark brown with black, white, 
and yellow patches. The most val¬ 
ued ones are marked like tortoise¬ 
shell. They are very pretty, gentle 
little animals, and are much kept as 
pets. Their food is wholly vege¬ 
table. They will eat whatever rab¬ 
bits eat, but they like parsley and 
carrot tops best of all, and are very 
fond of tea leaves and of fruits. 
Though cleanly, they have a bad 
smell about them. 

The Guinea pig is a MAMMAL of 
the order rodentia, or gnawing ani¬ 
mals. 

GUITAR, a stringed musical in¬ 
strument, used chiefly to accompany 
the voice in singing. The cithara, 
which was something like the guitar, 
was used by the Egyptians at least 
1500 B.C. The modern guitar has 
six strings, the three highest of which 
are of catgut and the three lowest 
of silk covered with silver wire. It 
has always been much used in giving 
serenades, especially by the Spanish. 

The word guitar is from the Latin 
cithara , Greek kithara , a cithera. 

GULL, the name of a family of 
birds in which are several kinds called 
gulls, the stormy petrel, the alba¬ 
tross, and others. The herring or 
silvery gull, which is white, is seen 
all along the Atlantic coast. It feeds 
chiefly on herring. The black-backed 
gull is larger, and has slate-colored 
back and wings, white breast, and 
yellow legs. It breeds in Labrador 
but goes as far south as Florida in 
winter. Gulls get their food near 
the surface of the water ; they are not 
very good divers, but are good swim¬ 
mers and strong flyers, and are often 
seen far out at sea. They live on 
small fish, shell fish, young birds, 
eggs, and floating carrion. A gull 


will sometimes carry a shell fish high 
up in the air and let it fall on a rock 
to break it. 

The Albatross is the largest of the 
gull family and the largest of web¬ 
footed birds. It sometimes weighs 
twenty pounds, and measures across 
its spread wings twelve to fifteen 
feet, or more than twice the length 
of a man. Its home is in the south¬ 
ern seas, especially around the Cape 
of Good Hope, where sailors call it 
the Cape sheep, and it is often seen 
far away from land in the middle of 
the ocean. It lives mostly on fish, 
which it swallows whole, and it is so 
greedy that it is sometimes seen 
with a part of its food hanging out 
of its mouth, waiting for what it has 
swallowed to digest. Albatrosses 
love to follow in the track of ships, 
to catch the small fish that come to 
the surface behind them, and to 
pounce upon anything which falls 
overboard. Though they are cow¬ 
ardly birds, they will attack a man 
in the water. A story is told of a 
sailor who fell overboard from a 
French ship, and could not be 
picked up at once because there was 
no boat ready to let down into the 
water. A flock of albatrosses settled 
on him and began to peck his head, 
and the poor fellow, unable to fight 
the waves and the birds at the same 
time, was drowned before his com¬ 
rades got to him. 

The word albatross is from the 
Portuguese alcatraz, a name given 
by the early sailors of that nation to 
large sea-birds. 

The Stormy Petrel, called by sail¬ 
ors Mother Cary’s chicken, is the 
smallest of web-footed birds. It is 
often seen at sea in all parts of the 
ocean, even in the most violent 
storms, which it appears to enjoy. 
Sailors think the petrels bring stormy 
weather, and are careful not to hurt 
them lest they should bring them ill 
luck. In calm weather these birds 
appear to walk along on the surface 
of the water, for which reason 
they are named after St. Peter (peter- 




GUM 


286 


GUNPOWDER 


el), who is said in the Bible to have 
walked on the sea. 

The gull belongs to the order 
natatores , or swimming BIRDS. 

The word gull is probably from 
an old Welsh or Breton word mean¬ 
ing to wail, and the bird is so named 
on account of its wailing cry. 

GUM, the hardened sap of certain 
trees and plants. Gums will dis¬ 
solve in water and not in alcohol, 
while resins will dissolve in alcohol, 
ether, etc., but not in water. 

Gum Arabic, the juice of several 
kinds of acacia trees that grow in 
Arabia, India, and Africa, will dis¬ 
solve entirely in water. It is used to 
thicken common ink and the colors 
with which calicoes are printed, for 
dressing muslins and silks, and also 
as a medicine. Gum Senegal, from 
Senegal on the western coast of 
Africa, and Barbaiy gum, from 
Morocco, are much like gum Arabic. 
They also are used for dressing fine 
goods and by confectioners for mak¬ 
ing gum drops. 

Gum Tragacanth, the juice of the 
goat - thorn, or tragacanth shrub, 
belongs to another class of gums, 
which soften and swell in water with¬ 
out dissolving entirely. It is brought 
mostly from Northern Persia and 
Asia Minor. It is much used for 
stiffening fabrics of cotton, linen, and 
silk, where gloss is not wanted. 

The word tragacanth is from the 
Greek tragakantha , which is from 
tragos, a he-goat, and akantha , a 
thorn. 

British gum, or dextrine, a kind 
of gum made from starch by heating 
it very hot, or by mixing it with weak 
nitric acid, is now much used instead 
of the more costly natural gums for 
stiffening calicoes and other goods. 
The gum on postage and revenue 
stamps is made of this. 

A class of gums called gum resins 
are part gum and part resin. They 
can be dissolved in a mixture of 
water and alcohol. Among the gum 
resins are assafoetida, myrrh, aloes, 
frankincense, and gamboge. 


The word gum is from the Anglo- 
Saxon goma, gum. 

GUN. See Rifle. 

GUN-COTTON, an explosive cot¬ 
ton which can be used instead of 
gunpowder. Common cotton is 
made up of carbon, oxygen, and 
hydrogen ; but when it is put into 
nitric ACID, it takes up from it ni¬ 
trogen, which is found in almost 
all things which will explode. 

Gun-cotton is made by soaking 
cotton-wool in a mixture of nitric and 
sulphuric acids. The sulphuric acid 
has no effect on the cotton, but is 
used to take up water and thus to 
make the action of the nitric acid 
more perfect. As soon as the cotton 
is fully soaked through, the acid is 
squeezed out of it, and it is washed 
until all the acid or sour taste is gone. 
After drying it is ready for use. Gun¬ 
cotton is more dangerous to make 
than gunpowder, because it explodes 
more easily and with much greater 
force. It costs, too, more than gun¬ 
powder, and is apt to take up moist¬ 
ure, when it is unfit for use until dried 
again. It is not much used now, 
not even for blasting rocks, as nitro¬ 
glycerine, made from glycerine in 
nearly the same way, is much 
stronger. 

Collodion, much used by photog¬ 
raphers to make the film or skin on 
the glass plates on which they take 
their pictures, is made out of gun¬ 
cotton mixed with alcohol and ether. 

Celluloid, a kind of false ivory, 
used for making knife handles, 
combs, brush handles, and almost 
everything made of real ivory, is 
made of gun-cotton, camphor, and 
other things. When first made it 
looks much like ivory, but it soon 
loses its gloss and its surface be¬ 
comes rough. Much false red and 
pink coral jewelry is made out of 
colored celluloid. 

The word gun-cotton is made up 
of GUN and COTTON. 

GUNNY. See Jute. 

GUNPOWDER. All gunpowder 
is made out of nitre or saltpetre, 





GUNPOWDER 


287 


GYPSUM 


CHARCOAL, and sulphur, and all 
nations make it in nearly the same 
way, using about 75 pounds of nitre, 
15 pounds of charcoal, and 10 pounds 
of sulphur for 100 pounds of gun¬ 
powder. The materials are first 
made as pure as possible, the nitre 
being soaked in spring water, then 
boiled and cooled, then filtered 
through canvas bags and allowed to 
harden again. This is done twice 
until it becomes perfectly white. 
The sulphur is also purified twice by 
being kept melted for several hours 
in gun-metal pots. The charcoal, 
which is made from dog-wood, 
alder, or willow, is burned in large 
vessels of. iron instead of in the 
open air, as most charcoal is made, 
and must be thoroughly charred and 
soft. 

The three substances are first 
ground separately to a fine powder, 
and are then ground together with a 
little water until they are thoroughly 
mixed. The mixture, now called 
“millcake,” is next pressed very 
hard in a hydrostatic press (see Wa¬ 
ter) into thin smooth cakes, called 
“press-cake,” which is afterward 
broken up between toothed rollers 
and rubbed through sieves until it is 
made into grains of the right sizes. 
The next thing is glazing, which is 
done by putting the grains into can¬ 
vas bags or into a barrel, which is 
made to turn round very fast. The 
grains, by rubbing against each 
other, are thus worn round and 
smooth, and get a glaze or polish. 
This is very important, because 
glazed powder keeps dry and bears 
shaking better than other powder. 
After glazing the powder is dried in 
rooms heated by steam pipes. 

The making of gunpowder is very 
dangerous, because it is liable to ex¬ 
plode and blow up the mill. When 
gunpowder explodes, that which was 
a solid is suddenly turned into a gas, 
which takes up about two thousand 
times as much room as the solid did. 
As this gas must find room for itself, 
it drives everything out of its way : 


it blows up a house in which it is 
stored, splits open rocks in a quarry 
or mine, or forces a ball out of a can¬ 
non. In making fireworks gun¬ 
powder is used in many different 
forms. 

The word gunpowder is made up 
of gun, from the new Latin gunna, 
a fire tube, and powder, French pou- 
dre , from Latin pulvis , dust. 

GUTTA-PERCHA, the dried milky 
juice of a tree which grows in the 
Malay archipelago. The tree is very 
large, being sometimes three feet 
thick. The Malays usually cut down 
the tree, strip off the bark, and scrape 
up the juice which lies between the 
wood and the bark ; but sometimes 
they only bore a hole in the tree and 
catch the sap in gourds. As the 
juice hardens it is made into large 
cakes or lumps, and sent to foreign 
countries. Pure gutta-percha is gray¬ 
ish white, but we usually see it dis¬ 
colored with dirt, and it has to be 
cleaned before it is fit for use. It is 
cut up into small pieces by machinery 
and softened into a paste with hot 
water, when it may be rolled or 
worked into any form. It may be 
softened at any time and moulded 
into any shape, which it will keep 
when it cools. Gutta-percha is made 
into a great number of things. As 
it is water-proof it is used for shoe 
soles, water pipes, and for covering 
cloth for clothing. Surgeons make 
splints of it to bind broken limbs to, 
because by softening it can be fitted 
to the shape of the limb ; dentists fill 
teeth with it, and chemists use 
bottles, SYPHONS, and funnels made 
of it, for acids which will eat glass. 
Telegraph wires are coated with it, 
and ink-stands, trays, picture frames, 
architectural ornaments, etc., are 
made of it. 

The word gutta-percha is from the 
Malay words gutta , gum, and 
percha , the name of the tree from 
which it comes. 

GYPSUM, a soft chalky kind of 
stone. A fine grained solid kind of 
gypsum is called alabaster, and 





GYPSUM 


288 


GYPSUM 


another kind, so clear that one can 
see through it, is called selenite. 
Satin spar is a beautiful kind used 
for necklaces and inlaid work. Pure 
gypsum is usually white, yellowish 
white, or gray, but is sometimes yel¬ 
low, red, brown, or black, according 
to the other things mixed with it. 


Gypsum baked in ovens and ground 
to powder makes the white plaster 
called Plaster of Paris, so much used 
for making casts, cornices, and ceil¬ 
ings. Ground gypsum is often put 
on land for manure. 

The word gypsum is Latin, and is 
from the Greek gufisos, white lime. 





H 


HAIL. There are two kinds of 
hail : the small grains, like fine shot, 
which often fall in winter, but rarely 
in summer, and which generally 
come before snow ; and larger hail, 
which falls usually in hot weather, 
and is most severe in very hot cli¬ 
mates. The first kind is caused by 
the freezing of rain drops as they 
pass in falling through colder air than 
that from which they started ; the 
second kind, or common hail, is 
made by the meeting of two currents 
of air, one very warm and loaded 
with vapor, and the other very cold. 

It is known, by going up in balloons 
and in other ways, that the air is not 
all of the same heat, but is divided 
up into cold and warm parts or 
layers, a layer of very cold air, much 
below freezing, often lying between 
two warm parts. When bodies of 
warm damp air move upward into 
one of these layers of cool dry air, 
the damp air is at once changed into 
ice, and hail falls. Sometimes the 
hailstones thus formed are very small, 
and sometimes many meet and freeze 
together into large masses. They 
are usually not much larger than a 
walnut or a pigeon’s egg, but some 
have been seen as large as an orange, 
and in very hot countries hailstones 
larger than a sheep are said to fall 
sometimes. In i860, during a hail 
storm which took place while an 
English ship was off the Cape of 
Good Hope, stones of the size of a 
half brick fell and hurt many of the 
sailors. Hailstones often do great 
harm to crops, especially in France, 
Germany, and India. 


The word hail is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hagol , hail. 

HAIR, including bristles, fur, wool, 
etc., is a part of the skin, and has 
the same use as feathers in birds and 
scales in reptiles. Hairs are made 
up of a shaft and a bulb. The shaft, 
or part outside of the skin, does not 
grow ; but the bulb, or part under 
the skin, which is made up of little 
cells, grows by forming new cells, 
the old ones being pressed forward 
and becoming a part of the shaft. 
Hair is much like horn, and, like it, 
grows in layers. Its color is caused 
by a kind of oil which comes from 
cells in the bulb. In dark hair this 
oil is dark brown, in red hair it is 
blood-red, and in fair hair it is yel¬ 
lowish. There is none of this color¬ 
ing oil in white hair. Straight hair 
is nearly round, but curly or crisp 
hair, like that of the negro, is flat¬ 
tened, and the hair of the Bushman, 
in Africa, is nearly as flat as a rib¬ 
bon. But the hair of the negro, 
though different from that of the 
European, is real hair, and not wool 
as some think. 

Hair is very strong and very last¬ 
ing. It is also very elastic, that is, 
springy, and for this reason is much 
used for stuffing cushions,mattresses, 
sofas, etc. The best curled hair is 
made from the shorter parts of the 
manes and tails of horses. It is first 
carded or combed straight between 
teeth or combs, and twisted into 
ropes ; then soaked in cold water, 
heated in an oven, and untwisted, 
when it keeps the curl given it in the 
rope. The hair of cows and the finer 




HAIR 


290 


HAMMER 


kinds of pigs’ hair are sometimes 
used for making curled hair. The 
long hairs of horses’ tails are woven 
into hair cloth for covering furniture. 
As the hairs of different horses are 
of various colors, they are first dyed 
black with LOGWOOD and copperas 
(IRON sulphate). White horse hair 
can be dyed of any color, and is 
much used for making fancy hair 
cloths, especially in South America. 
White horse hair is also used for 
making violin bows and fine fishing 
lines, and is woven into hats and 
bonnets for women’s wear. The 
kind of cloth called crinoline was at 
first made of white or gray horse 
hair, but is now made mostly from 
the fibre or thready part of the agave 
or American ALOE. 

The weaving of horse-hair cloth 
differs from other weaving, on ac¬ 
count of the shortness of the hairs, 
which can be used for the weft only, 
the warp (see Cloth) being gen¬ 
erally of black linen yarn, but some¬ 
times of worsted or cotton. Each 
thread of the weft is a single hair, j 
so that the cloth can be made only as 
wide as the hairs are long. Horse 
hair is sometimes twisted into yarn or 
thread, and woven into sacking, or 
made into ropes. In Germany cow , 
hair is made into yarn and woven 
into carpets, and in Norway the 
peasants make socks of it. The hair 
of CAMELS, GOATS, and dogs is 
also used for weaving, and the hair 
and fur of beavers, rabbits, and 
other small animals for making 
FELT. Hogs’ hair and bristles are 
largely used in BRUSH making. 

Human hair is used chiefly for 
making wigs, curls, chignons, 
beards, moustaches, etc. Most of 
it comes from France, Italy, and 
Germany, where young peasant 
women sell their hair to wandering 
dealers, who go round the country to 
collect it. These sell it to hair mer¬ 
chants, who partly dress it, and sell 
it again to the wig-makers. Light 
hair comes mostly from Germany, 
and the darker shades from Italy 


and France. Human hair is also 
plaited into ornamental work, such 
as chains, watch guards, brooches, 
and various fanciful things, even pic¬ 
tures having been made from it. 

The word hair is from the Anglo- 
Saxon heir , hair. 

HALIBUT, a large flat sea fish. 
It sometimes grows to be longer 
than a man, and weighs 100 to 500 
pounds. It is caught by hook and 
line all along the Atlantic coast from 
New York northwards. Its flesh is 
coarse and somewhat dry. The 
Greenlanders catch halibut by spear¬ 
ing them from their boats with a 
kind of HARPOON, to which a line 
is fastened. They salt, dry, and 
smoke the flesh. 

The word halibut, or holibut, as it 
is sometimes spelled, is from the 
Dutch heilbot , halibut. 

HAMMER. In very ancient times, 
before metals were known, stones 
were used for hammers, sometimes 
with and sometimes without a 
handle. The handle of a stone 
hammer was usually made by twist¬ 
ing a withe or small twig of a tree 
round a crease in the stone, as 



Ancient Stone Hammer. 


shown in the picture. Handles like 
this were put also on stone axes 
and hatchets. 

Hand Hammers are now made of 
many different sizes and shapes, 
almost every kind of trade having a 



Carpenter’s Hammer. 

hammer of its own. Several of 
these are shown in the pictures. 
Large two-handed hammers, used 














HAMMER 


291 


HAMMER 


by blacksmiths and other metal 
workers, are called sledge hammers. 
Heavy wooden hammers, used by 



Plumber’s Hammer. 


woodmen and others to drive wedges 
into wood, are called beetles, and 
smaller wooden ones, used by car- 



Farrier’s Hammer. 


penters and joiners, are called mal¬ 
lets. 

Power Hammers are those which 



Blacksmith’s Hammer. 


are worked by machinery. Among 
them are forge hammers, used in 
forging, or hammering into shape, 



Machinist’s Hammer. 


heavy masses of red-hot iron, and 
tilt hammers, used for lighter work, 
such as forging bars of shear STEEL. 



Engineer’s Hammer. 


The forge hammer is a great bar of 
cast iron, having on one end of it a 
wrought-iron head faced with steel, 


weighing five to ten tons. The 
other end is made to work on an 
axle, so that the head can move up 
and down. The metal to be forged 
is heated white hot and then lifted 



Shoemaker’s Hammer. 


by means of a crane and put under 
the hammer, which is raised and 
let fall by the turning of a wheel 50 
to 100 times in a minute. This ham¬ 
mers the iron into shape and makes 



Cooper’s Hammer. 


it very solid. The tilt hammer 
works in the same way, only the 
wheel which moves it is. at the other 
end, which reaches beyond the axle 
on which it moves, as seen in the 



Coach-trimmer’s Hammer. 

picture. The hammer is thus made 
to tilt up and down, and works 
much faster than the forge ham¬ 
mer. 

In large iron works the steam 



forge hammer is now generally used. 
In the great Krupp works, at Essen, 
Germany, is a hammer which cost 
$580,000. The head, which weighs 
fifty tons, or as much as fifty com- 



































HARE 


292 


HARNESS 


mon loads of coal, is worked up 
and down by steam. A single 
workman can so manage it that it 
will come down with force enough 
to crush a thick iron bar, or with so 
gentle a tap that it will not crack a 
nut shell. The foundations of this 
great hammer are 100 feet deep in 
the ground, and are made up of 
stonework, heavy oak trunks, and 
iron bolted together (see Anvil). 
Four strong cranes, each able to lift 
200 tons, swing great masses of red- 
hot iron under this hammer, which 
works very fast and pounds them 
quickly into shape. The sound can 
be heard above all other noises 
when it is at work. 

Smaller steam hammers, working 
up and down in much the same way, 
are used in forging swords, scythes, 
axes, carpenters’ tools, etc. 

The word hammer is from the 
Anglo-Saxon hamer, hammer. 

HARE. Hares differ from rabbits 
chiefly in their habits. They do not 
live in societies, in warrens or bur¬ 
rows dug under ground, as rabbits 
do, but separately, each one making 
a nest of grass for itself. They are 
the enemies of rabbits and fight them 
when they meet Hares are found 
almost all over the world, excepting 
in Australia. They abound in the 
United States, where there are sev¬ 
eral kinds. The northern hare is 
found from Virginia to the coldest 
parts of British America. Its fur in 
summer is reddish brown, and in 
winter from white to yellowish gray. 
It lives on berries, bark, twigs, and 
buds of trees. It can run very swiftly, 
and will jump more than three times 
the length of a man. Hares afford 
fine sport to the hunter, and in some 
countries are hunted with hounds. 
The flesh of those living among hills 
is very good, and is much used for 
making soup, but that of hares liv¬ 
ing in low damp places is not so 
good for eating. 

The hare is easily tamed, if taken 
young, and becomes very familiar. 
It is said that Dr. Franklin had one 


which used to sit before the fire in 
winter, between a large cat and a 
greyhound, with both of which it 
lived on the best terms. It would 
jump up on the table beside its mas¬ 
ter and scratch his arm to attract his 
attention. Hares may be taught 
many tricks, but they like their 
liberty so well that they are apt to 
run away and become wild again. 

The hare is a mammal of the 
order rodentia , or gnawing ani¬ 
mals. 

The word hare is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hara , hare. 

HARNESS. The parts of a horse’s 
harness will be best understood by 
studying the picture, which shows a 
single harness. A harness is made 
up of four parts : 1, the driving 
part, or bridle and reins ; 2, the 
drawing part, consisting of the col¬ 
lar, hames, and traces ; 3, the 

supporting part, or part for holding 
up the shafts, made up of the saddle 
and its parts ; and 4, the holding- 
back part, or breeching. 

The bridle is made up of a head- 
piece V, a front-piece U, two cheek- 
pieces P, two blinders, blinkers, or 
winkers Q, a nose-band S, and a 
throat lash R. The bit, or part 
which goes into the horse’s mouth, 
is made of steel in three general 
ways, plain, jointed, or curbed. The 
plain bit, commonly called bar bit, 
is simply a long round piece of steel, 
a little bent, with a ring at each end 
to buckle the straps in ; the jointed 
bit, commonly called snaffle bit, is 
in two parts, jointed in the middle, 
and with rings like the plain bit; the 
curb bit has a bar on each side, as 
shown in the picture, with rings at 
the upper ends in which the cheek- 
pieces are buckled, and one or more 
rings on each side at the lower ends 
into which the reins are buckled. 
When the reins are pulled, a flat 
chain fastened in the upper rings of 
the bars and passing under the 
horse’s jaw is drawn tight so as to 
hurt, and the driver has thus more 
command of the horse. When the 





HARNESS 


293 


HARNESS 


plain or jointed bit is used alone, it 
commonly has a small bar at each 
end to keep the ring from getting 
into the horse’s mouth ; but some¬ 
times one of these bits is used with 
the curb bit, and then it is generally 
made without bars. 

The check-rein or bearing-rein B B, 
meant to hold the horse’s head in 
good shape, is also buckled to rings 
on each side of the bit; it is then 
passed through leather or metal loops ! 
on each side of the throat lash, and I 


hooked on the check-hook J on the 
saddle. The driving-reins, W W, 
are buckled into rings in the bit, and 
then passed through the martingale 
rings X. The martingale, which is 
made up of a strap Y fastened to the 
belly-band, passing between the 
horse’s front legs, and then through 
a ring in the hames, and ending in 
two straps each with a ring on the 
end, is meant to hold down the head 
of the horse, so that it may be driven 
more steadily. 



Horse with Single Harness. 


The collar of a harness, A, is an 
oval ring of leather, fitted to the 
shoulders, and padded so that the 
hames shall not hurt the horse. The 
hames, C, are flat iron bars, some¬ 
times covered with leather, some¬ 
times painted black, and sometimes 
silver-plated or brass, made to fit 
into a crease on the collar, and are 
fastened at the top and bottom by 
straps, D D. On each side of the 
upper part of the hames is a ring, E, 


called a hame teret, through which 
the driving-reins pass, and near the 
bottom a strong metal arm with a 
ring at its end, in which is fastened 
the tug, F, of the trace. The trace, 
G, is a broad, thick leather strap 
which fastens to thfe drawing-bar of 
the carriage, either by means of a 
hole at its end or of a metal loop or 
hook. As all the weight of the 
carriage is borne by the traces, of 
which there are two, one on each 











HARNESS 


294 


HARPOON 


side, they have to be made very 
strong. Traces may be lengthened 
or shortened by means of a buckle 
seen near the letter M in the picture. 

Of the supporting part of the har¬ 
ness, H is the saddle or pad, which 
has on its front a hook, J, for the 
check-rein, and on each side a ring, 
I, called a teret, through which the 
driving - reins pass. The saddle, 
which is usually made of patent 
leather, and padded underneath, 
is fastened to the horse by means of 
the belly-band K, which buckles 
round the horse. A strong leather 
strap, L, called the back-band, passes 
along the middle of the saddle and 
buckles round on the belly-band. 
Under it and fastened to it, on each 
side, is a stout leather loop, M, 
called the shaft-tug, into which the 
shafts of the carriage are put. The 
saddle is kept in its place by a back- 
strap, T, which runs from it to the 
crupper, Z, a round strap passing 
around the root of the horse’s tail. 
The carriage is kept from running 
on to the horse’s heels by the breech¬ 
ing, N, which passes round the ani¬ 
mal’s quarters, and is fastened to 
the shafts by the breeching-straps, 
O, of which there is one on each side. 

Some single harnesses are made 
different from this one. Instead of 
a hames collar, a breast collar is 
often used, especially for light car¬ 
riages, made up simply of a broad 
band, to the ends of which the 
traces are buckled, running round 
the breast of the horse, and held in 
place by another strap buckled near 
its ends and passing over the neck 
just in front of the withers. In 
some harnesses too the saddle and 
the straps under it are different, and 
a strap called a kicking-strap is put 
round the horse’s quarters instead 
of the breeching. Double harnesses 
are made much like single ones, but 
differ from them in some things, 
which cannot be easily told about 
without a picture, but which can be 
easily seen by looking at any pair of 
harnessed horses. 


After a horse is harnessed, it is 
put to the carriage or wagon by 
first slipping the shafts through the 
tugs, M. The traces should then 
be hitched to the drawing-bar, care 
being taken to fasten them so that 
they cannot get off. The breeching 
should next be buckled, and then the 
belly-band. After this the reins 
should be taken in hand, and the 
driver may then get in and take his 
seat. 

The word harness, French har- 
nois, once meant the armor of a sol¬ 
dier, which was fastened on with 
straps and buckles. 

HARP, a musical instrument 
shaped like a triangle, and strung 
with Wires and catgut cords from 
the upper part to one of the sides. 
It is played by pulling the strings 
with the thumb and fingers. The 
harp is a very ancient instrument, 
and is pictured on the Egyptian 
monuments, but it was very imper¬ 
fect until the beginning of this cen¬ 
tury, when the double-action pedals 
were added to it. There are seven 
pedals (Latin, pes , plural pedes, the 
foot, so called because they are 
worked by the foot) on the best 
harps, by using which the tones of 
the strings can be made higher or 
lower as the player wishes. The 
harp is now sometimes used in an 
ORCHESTRA. 

The word harp is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hearp. 

HARPOON, a kind of spear used 
for killing whales and other large 
fish. There are several kinds, but 
the simplest form is an iron spear 
about five feet long, with a sharp flat 
point with barbs, as shown in the 
picture. The edges of the point are 
made sharp so that it will go into the 
whale easily, and when in the barbs 
keep it from pulling out. 

The gun harpoon is a short bar of 
iron, with a chain and ring at the 
end to fasten the rope to. This is 
fired from a small cannon in the 
bow of the boat. Sometimes glass 
tubes filled with a strong poison are 




HARROW 


295 


HAT 


so fitted into the harpoon that they 
will break as soon as the line is 
drawn tight. But the 
American harpoon - ball, 
called the “bomb-lance,” 
is now chiefly used in 
whale-fishing. This is a 
pointed cast - iron tube 
filled with gunpowder, 
which is fired from a gun. 
A few seconds after it has 
been shot into the whale 
a dull sound is heard— 
made by the bomb burst¬ 
ing inside its body. The 
whale turns a somersault, 
and dies very soon, some¬ 
times at once. Poison is 
also sometimes put into 
the bomb, but sailors pre¬ 
fer it without it, as they do 
not like to handle the flesh 
of awhale killed by poison. 

The word harpoon is in 
French harfion, which is 
Harpoon. f r0 m harper , to seize or 
grasp. 

HARROW, an instrument used by 
farmers for breaking up lumps of 
earth and smoothing plowed land. 
Harrows are made usually of wood, 
either in the shape of a triangle, a 
square, or an oblong, in which are 
fixed rows of iron teeth or spikes 
pointing downward ; but some are 
made wholly of iron. When drawn 
over the ground by horses these 
teeth smooth the soil and make it fit 
for planting, or cover up the seeds 
already sown. 

The word harrow is from the 
Anglo-Saxon hereu>e y harrow. 

HARTSHORN. See Ammonia. 

HAT. Besides straw hats, there 
are two kinds of hats in common 
use, felt hats and silk hats. Felt 
hats are made of felted fur or 
wool. The chief kind of fur used is 
that of rabbits and hares, but the 
fur of the muskrat, and that of the 
coypu, a Brazilian animal about as 
large as the beaver, is sometimes 
mixed with them. After the fur on 
the skins has been thoroughly 


cleaned, it is cut off by a machine. 
The different kinds are then mixed 
together with a little cotton in the 
picking machine ; the fur next passes 
through the blowing machine, which 
separates all the coarse hairs and the 
dust from the finer fur, and it is 
then ready to be made into a hat 
body. 

Hat bodies were once formed by 
hand, but they are now made on a 
machine. In this machine there is a 
hollow vessel of copper, shaped like a 
cone or sugar loaf, and punched full 
of little holes, which is made to turn 
round slowly. Inside of this a kind 
of fan buzzes round about 4000 
times every minute, making the air 
rush in from the outside through all 
the holes. When the fur is put into 
the machine it is blown little by little 
against the outside of the copper 
cone, and as the air is always draw¬ 
ing toward the inside, it is spread 
evenly all over the top and sides, 
and matted together so as to make 
a covering of just the shape of the 
cone. As soon as this is done, a 
workman wraps a wet cloth around 
it, puts a copper cover over that, 
and then takes off the whole, cone 
and all, and sets it in a tank of hot 
water, while a new cone is put into 
the machine for another hat body to 
form on. The hot water thickens 
and makes tougher the mat on the 
cone, which is called the “ shell,” 
and which is soon taken off and 
squeezed and pressed. The hat 
thus far is nothing but an open bag, 
shaped like a sugar loaf. It now 
passes to the hatter, who generally 
buys his felt hats in this form. 

The hatter first dips the shells into 
hot water and rubs them together 
on a table. This, which is called 
“ sizing” them, makes them smaller 
and thicker. They are next dyed 
and then “ blocked,” which means 
stretching them over a wooden block 
of the size and shape of the hat to 
be made. After this they are 
“ pounced,” that is, the rough sur¬ 
face is smoothed in a machine by 








HAUTBOY 


296 


HAWK 


means of an emery wheel. The 
hat is now blocked again and the 
brim is curled, and it is then finished 
by girls, who bind it, put on the rib¬ 
bon, and put in the lining. 

Silk Hats are made of a body of 
muslin, stiffened with a varnish of 
shell - LAC, AMMONIA, and water. 
The brim of the hat needs five or 
six thicknesses of muslin, and the 
top and sides only one or two. . The 
pieces are fitted together over a 
wooden block, the side being put on 
first, then the top, and lastly the 
brim. These are fastened together 
with strips of thin muslin wet with 
varnish and ironed down. When 
the body is dry it is covered with the 
silk plush, the best kind of which is 
brought from Lyons, in France. 
The piece on the under side of the 
rim is first ironed on, the heat of the 
iron softening the varnish and caus¬ 
ing the silk to stick. The upper 
side of the rim is next covered, and 
lastly the top and sides. The round 
piece for the top is sewed to the side 
before it is put on, and the whole is 
then slipped over and ironed down 
until it sticks firmly to the body, 
care being taken to hide the seams. 
The hat is then lined and trimmed, 
and afterward finished with the iron. 

The word hat is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hat , hat. 

HAUTBOY, or OBOE, a wind 
musical instrument, used in or¬ 
chestras and bands. It is shaped 
much like a Clarinet, but is thin-' 
ner, and has more keys. It is made 
of wood, usually of box, ebony, 
cocoa, or rosewood, and in three 
jointed pieces. In the upper joint 
is fitted a mouth-piece made up 
of a small brass tube with a reed 
or tongue in its end, much like 
the reed in a clarinet. The haut¬ 
boy has a piercing sound, but its 
notes are rich. It was once used 
only in military bands, but it is now 
a part of all orchestras. 

The word hautboy is made from 
the French haut bois (high wood), 
and the instrument is so named from 


its high piercing sound. The Italian 
form of the word is oboe y and it is 
now much used instead of hautboy. 

HAWK. The birds commonly 
called hawks belong to the falcon 
family, but they are smaller and their 
wings are shorter than those of the 
true falcons. There are several kinds 
in the United States, among which 
are the goshawk, the hen hawk, the 
FISH hawk, the pigeon hawk, the 
sparrow hawk. Cooper’s hawk, and 
the sharp-shinned hawk. 

The Goshawk (goose-hawk) is the 
largest of these birds, being more 
like the falcons than any other 
hawks, and in old times was used in 
hawking to catch hares, rabbits, and 
birds which do not fly very high. 
It feeds chiefly on wild pigeons, 
ducks, and grouse, and often hovers 
over poultry yards, swooping down 
upon a chicken or a duck and flying 
off with it before the farmer can get 
out his gun. The goshawk builds 
a large coarse nest in trees, and lays 
bluish-white eggs marked with light- 
brown spots. 

The Hen Hawk, sometimes called 
also the marsh hawk and the har¬ 
rier, is not quite as large as the gos¬ 
hawk. It is found in almost all 
parts of the United States, and is 
often seen in flocks. It does not fly 
very high, but skims along over the 
fields looking for crickets, lizards, 
small snakes, frogs, and small birds, 
on which it chiefly feeds. It loves 
to visit hen yards to steal chickens, 
but a common hen can easily drive 
it off. The hen hawk usually builds 
its nest of dried grasses in a hollow 
scooped in the ground, and lays three 
or four bluish-white eggs, marked 
sometimes with reddish brown. 

Pigeon and Sparrow Hawks live 
mostly on young birds. Cooper’s 
Hawk is one of the boldest of hawks, 
and will attack birds larger than it¬ 
self. It feeds chiefly on grouse, 
quails, pigeons, and hares. The 
sharp - shinned hawk is also very 
bold, and will seize prey too heavy 
for it to carry off. 







HAY 


297 


HEAT 


Hawks belong to the order rap- 
tores , or birds of prey. 

The word hawk is made from 
the Saxon hafoc ; from which also 
comes our word havoc, meaning 
waste or destruction, on account of 
the cruelty of the hawk. 

HAY, grass cut and cured for 
fodder. After being mown with the 
scythe or mowing machine, and as 
soon as the dew is off, the grass is 
shaken up and spread out with forks 
or with a tedding machine. Before 
evening it is raked up into wind¬ 
rows, and, if it looks like rain, is 
made into small cocks. In the morn¬ 
ing, if the weather is good, it is again 
spread out, and this is kept up 
usually two or three days, until it is 
dry, when it is put into stacks or 
packed into mows in a barn. 

When grass is cut in bloom, as it 
ought to be, because then its stems 
are the most tender, it has to be 
dried with care, as it is full of sap. 
If it is put into the mow before it is 
fully dry, it will become heated and 
dark colored, and cattle and horses 
will not eat it as well as good hay. 
If it is wet with rain or dew when it 
is put away, it will mould. Hay 
that has been wet and dried several 
times is usually salted to give it a 
better flavor. 

The word hay is from the Anglo- 
Saxon heag , hay. 

HAZEL-NUT, the fruit of the ha¬ 
zel bush. The common American 
hazel bush grows about as high as a 
man, and is among the first of the 
trees to blossom in spring. The 
fruit, which is covered with a bearded 
husk, is a nut with a hard shell and 
a large sweet kernel. In England 
the hazel is much cultivated for its 
nuts. Those with a long husk are 
called filberts (full beard), those with 
a short husk hazel nuts, and the 
round hard-shelled nuts cob-nuts. 
Most of the filberts brought to the 
United States come from Spain and 
other parts of the south of Europe. 
The wood of the hazel is used for 
making crates, hoops, and whip 


handles. Its charcoal makes good 
crayons, and a valuable oil is pressed 
from its nuts. 

The word hazel is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hdsel, hazel. 

HEAT. There is no such thing as 
cold. When we say that a thing is 
cold, we mean only that it has but 
little heat in it, for everything, even 
ice, has some heat in it. We can 
measure the amount of heat in dif¬ 
ferent things, and we know a great 
deal about how it acts, but we do 
not really know what it is. Heat is 
never alone by itself, but is always 
with something else : we may have 
hot air, hot water, and hot iron, but 
no one can divide the heat from the 
air, water, or iron, and keep it di¬ 
vided. We can easily make heat 
pass from one thing into another 
thing, because when things which 
have different amounts of heat in 
them are put together, the heat will 
spread itself around so as to make 
all of the same heat. A piece of 
iron put into burning coals becomes 
hot because the heat passes from 
the coals into the iron until both 
have the same amount of heat in 
them. 

Most of the heat in the world 
comes with the LIGHT from the 
SUN. We can easily set fire to 
things by gathering together the 
sun’s rays and bringing them to a 
point with a LENS called a burning- 
glass. Heat and light also come 
together from the fires which we 
make, but the two will not pass 
together through glass so easily as 
the heat and light from the sun. If 
you hold a pane of glass between 
your face and the fire, the light will 
pass through quickly, but the heat 
will be nearly stopped by the glass ; 
yet both the light and the heat from 
the sun pass easily through windows. 
We do not know the exact reason of 
the difference between these two 
heats. The sun is thus a great 
storehouse of heat, from which the 
earth gets its warmth and which 
makes it possible for us to live. 





HEAT 


298 


HEAT 


But all heat does not have light 
with it, for all animals have heat in 
their bodies, made by the union of 
oxygen, which they breathe in with 
the air, and the carbon and hy¬ 
drogen of the blood. This union 
is a kind of burning, which is always 
going on within us, but without 
making any light. Our bodies are 
thus not made warm by any outside 
fire or by clothing, but by the burn¬ 
ing within us. As the air and other 
things around us are usually colder 
than our bodies, they are all the 
time taking away the heat from us ; 
for, as told before, heat always tries 
to spread itself around so as to make 
all things of an equal heat. Fires 
and clothing therefore do not really 
give us heat, but make us warm by 
keeping the heat in our bodies from 
passing off into the air. The fur of 
animals and the feathers of birds act 
in the same way, and they are 
always thicker in winter than in sum¬ 
mer. More heat is made in active 
or lively animals than in those which 
move slowly. When you run fast 
you become much warmer than when 
you stand or sit still. This is be¬ 
cause it makes your heart beat 
quicker, and this causes the blood to 
move faster through your body and 
make more heat. When your body 
gets warmer than it ought to be you 
perspire, and the perspiration then 
turns into vapor and carries off the 
heat with it into the air. Animals 
which usually have the most heat in 
them cannot bear a lower amount 
of heat as well as those which do 
not have so much heat in them. 
Thus birds, which are always mov¬ 
ing, and thus have the most heat in 
them, cannot stand cold weather, 
and this is the reason why so many 
kinds go south in the winter ; but 
fishes, whose blood usually has only 
as much heat in it as the water, can 
be frozen up in ice and live. 

Just as the union of oxygen and 
carbon in the blood causes heat, so 
the union of other substances will 
do the same thing. Thus, if we mix 


sulphuric acid and water together, 
the mixture will become very hot. 
The same thing will happen if we 
pour water on to lime. In doing 
this we do not make any heat, but 
as all things have heat in them we 
merely wake up this heat in two 
things by mixing them together. 
Heat is also waked up in things by 
pounding or by rubbing them. 
When a blacksmith strikes a piece 
of cold iron on his anvil with his 
hammer, he wakes up the heat in it, 
and by striking it long enough he 
can make it quite hot. If two pieces 
of dry wood be rubbed together long 
enough, heat enough will be waked 
up in them to set them in a blaze, 
as is told about in the article Fire. 
When carriage wheels are dry and 
fit too tightly, they sometimes catch 
fire. This is because the wheel rubs 
hard on the axle and wakes up its 
heat. 

Heat tries to spread itself in every 
direction in three ways. First, by 
touching, as when a hot thing is 
put on a cold thing ; the heat passes 
from one into the other, and the 
two thus get an equal amount of 
heat. Secondly, by conduction, as 
when heat travels from one end of 
a thing to the other end. For in¬ 
stance, if one end of an iron bar be 
put into a fire the heat will spread 
all through it. Heat thus spread is 
said to be conducted. A piece of 
wood burning at one end becomes 
only slightly heated at the other end. 
Hence some things are said to be 
good conductors of heat, and others 
bad conductors. The metals are 
the best conductors of heat; glass 
is a poor conductor, and wood a still 
poorer one. This is the reason why 
iron tools used in fires have wooden 
handles fitted to them. Such things 
as hair, fur, feathers, and wool are 
also bad conductors of heat; and 
this is why they keep heat from pass¬ 
ing off from the bodies of animals. 
We wrap ice up in flannel because 
flannel is a bad conductor of heat, 
and keeps the heat of the air from 





HEAT 


299 


HEAT 


getting to the ice. A third way in 
which heat travels is called radiation. 
This is where a thing is warmed by 
putting it before a fire, but not 
touching it. The heat passes over 
to it, or is radiated to it, from the 
fire. Rough things always radiate 
more heat than smooth ones. 

All things, whether solid, liquid, 
or gaseous, are expanded, or made 
larger, by adding to their heat. If 
a bar of iron which will just go 
through a hole be heated, it will be 
swelled so that it will no longer go 
through it. This is of value in fixing 
tires on wheels. The tire is made a 
little too small for the wheel, and is 
then expanded or enlarged by heat¬ 
ing it, when it is easily slipped on. 
When it cools it becomes of the 
same size as it was at first and fits 
so tightly that it binds all parts of 
the wheel firmly together. In laying 
track on railroads the rails are always 
put a little way apart at the ends ; if 
they were laid close together they 
would expand on a very warm day 
and push each other out of place. 
If a flask full of water be heated the 
water will expand and run over. 
Molasses and oil do not weigh so 
much in summer as in winter, be¬ 
cause they are swelled and made 
thinner by heat, so that there is a less 
amount in a gallon than when it is 
cold. The mercury or alcohol in 
the bulb of a thermometer is ex¬ 
panded by heat and rises up in the 
tube ; the more heat there is the 
higher it rises ; and in this way we 
are enabled to measure the amount 
of heat. Air and other gases are 
also expanded by heat. During 
summer the earth becomes heated 
by the sun, and then heats the air 
above it. This warm air rises and 
cooler air rushes in to take its place, 
and this makes a breeze. 

There is one thing which is not 
expanded or made larger, like other 
things, by adding to its heat. If 
boiling water be cooled it will be¬ 
come smaller in bulk only until it 
reaches a certain point (39 0 F.), and 


then it will begin to expand again 
until it is frozen ; so that water really 
grows larger instead of smaller by 
freezing. This is very important, 
for if it were not so water would 
begin to freeze at the bottom, and 
all lakes and ponds would become 
so filled up with ice that they would 
not thaw out in summer. But now, 
as water swells in bulk as it gets 
near the freezing point, it rises to 
the surface, and the ice is first 
formed on the top. 

When a solid thing turns into a 
liquid thing, or when a liquid thing 
turns into a gas (see Element), a 
great deal of heat is used up. For 
instance, if the two solids salt and 
ice be mixed together, they will turn 
into a liquid which will be very 
much colder than the two things of 
which it was made. This is because 
they absorb or take up a good deal 
of heat in passing from the solid to 
the liquid state. Such a mixture is 
called a freezing mixture, and is 
much used in freezing ice. cream and 
other things. The cream to be 
frozen is put into a tin pail which sits 
in another pail so that it is sur¬ 
rounded on all sides by the mixture 
of ice and salt. The outer pail is 
usually of wood, which is a non¬ 
conductor of heat, and as the ice and 
salt need heat to melt they draw it 
from the cream, which is thus 
frozen. 

In the same way, when a liquid 
turns into a gas it needs a great deal 
of heat and gets it wherever it can. 
If a little ether be poured on the 
hand, it soon flies away as a gas, 
and leaves the hand very cold. 
This is because it has drawn a good 
deal of heat out of the hand in order 
to turn into gas. If a pan of water 
be put under the receiver of an AIR- 
PUMP beside a pan with some strong 
SULPHURIC ACID in it, and the air 
be then pumped out, the water will 
evaporate or turn to vapor very fast, 
and in doing so will draw so much 
heat from itself that it will turn into 
ice. Much artificial ice is now made 






HEMLOCK 


300 


HERON 


in hot countries by machines which 
work on this principle. 

The word heat is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hate , heat. 

HEMLOCK, or HEMLOCK 
SPRUCE, an evergreen cone-bearing 
tree, common in North America. 
It grows chiefly on the northern bor¬ 
ders of the United States and in Can¬ 
ada, where there are vast forests of 
it. It is a beautiful tree when it 
stands alone, forming a pyramid of 
green from the ground to the top, 
which is sometimes 100 feet high, 
or higher than a very tall house ; 
but when it grows in a forest its 
trunk is usually without branches 
most of the way up. From the 
hemlock is got a good deal of com¬ 
mon lumber, it being much used for 
beams and rafters, and for sheathing, 
or the covering of houses under the 
shingles and clapboards. Hemlock 
bark is largely used in tanning 
leather, and many trees are killed by 
stripping them and leaving them to 
decay. 

Socrates is said to have been put 
to death by being forced to take a 
dose of hemlock poison. This was 
not the juice of the hemlock spruce, 
which is not poisonous, but probably 
of a plant called poison hemlock or 
conium, which does not grow as tall 
as a man. Some think it was the 
juice of the water hemlock, another 
small plant. 

The word hemlock is from the 
Anglo-Saxon hemlcLac , which means 
the poison hemlock. 

HEMP. The hemp plant, which 
grows in many parts of the world, 
is raised every year from the seed. 
It is sometimes only three to four 
feet high, and sometimes more than 
twice as high as a man, according to 
the richness of the soil and the heat 
of the climate. The stem is hol¬ 
low, or filled with a soft pith ; 
around the pith is a tender woody 
substance, and outside of that is the 
bark, made up of strong threads cov¬ 
ered with a thin outer skin 

When the hemp is ripe the plants 


are pulled up, the leaves, flowers, 
and roots cut off, and the stalks tied 
up in bundles. The next thing is 
the retting or rotting of the stalks 
by soaking them in water to soften 
the vegetable glue which holds the 
threads together. After this has 
been done, they are dried, either in 
the sun, in warm rooms, or in ovens. 
They are then “ broken,” 44 scutch¬ 
ed,” and ‘‘hackled” in the same 
way as flax. After spinning the 
hemp is woven into various kinds of 
heavy cloths, such as canvas, tent- 
cloth, sail-cloth, bagging, and sack¬ 
ing, and also into many kinds of 
cordage and ropes. See Jute and 
Manila. 

The word hemp is from the 
Anglo-Saxon henep, hemp. 

HERON, the name of a family of 
birds which includes, besides the 
herons proper, the egrets and bit¬ 
terns. The body is small for the 
length of the neck and the legs. 
The legs are very long and slender, 
and the bill is longer than the head, 
and comes to a sharp point. When 
the heron flies the head and neck are 
stretched out straight in front of the 
body and the long legs are stretched 
out straight behind. Herons feed 
mostly on fish, frogs, crabs, and 
other water animals, and they may 
often be seen standing quietly in 
shallow water along the edges of 
rivers or lakes, or along the sea 
shore, watching for fish. As soon 
as a fish comes along it is seized in 
the long bill and swallowed at once. 
Herons build their nests in high 
trees near the water, and feed their 
young with fish until they are old 
enough to care for themselves. 

There are several kinds of herons 
in the United States, including the 
Louisiana heron, of a slaty blue 
color; the snowy heron and the 
great white heron, both pure white ; 
the great blue heron or blue crane, 
with a bluish body and a black head ; 
the great American egret and the 
great white egret, which are white ; 
and the green bittern or heron. 





HERRING 


301 


HERRING 


The European heron was the bird 
most hunted when falconry or hawk¬ 
ing was in fashion. It has a beau¬ 
tiful black glossy crest on the back 
of the head, which in old times was 
much valued as an ornament, and 
was worn only by nobles. It still 
forms the centre of the white ostrich 
plume in the caps of Knights of the 
Garter. The flesh of the heron was 
in old times thought to be very fine 
eating, and was served only on the 
tables of the rich and great. In 
order to get this delicacy more easily 
places called heronries were made in 
forests on the lands of nobles, where 
they were allowed to live and breed 
in peace until they were wanted for 
the table. Heron’s flesh is not now 
much eaten, but in England some 
great families still keep up the heron¬ 
ries on their estates in memory of 
the olden time. 

The heron belongs to the order 
grallatores, or wading BIRDS. 

The word heron is in French 
hiron , and the bird was probably so 
named from its harsh cry. 

HERRING, the name of a family 
of FISHES which includes the true 
herring, the SHAD, the whitebait, 
the sprat, the SARDINE, and the 
ANCHOVY. The true herrings are 
sea fishes, and never go up rivers to 
spawn, as shad and some other fish 
do. They appear almost every 
spring, summer, and autumn, in 
vast numbers, on the shores of 
Europe, Asia, and America, swim¬ 
ming near the top of the water, and 
followed by multitudes of larger 
fishes and by gulls, fish hawks, and 
other sea birds, which feed on them. 
In the winter they go off into deep 
water. 

The herring has a large mouth, 
and the under jaw sticks out a little 
beyond the upper one, as is shown 
in the picture. The gills have very 
long fringes, which become stuck 
together when the fish is out of the 
water, so that it lives but a short time. 
From this comes the common saying, 
“ as dead as a herring.” Herrings 


love to swim with their noses out of 
water, as if to breathe the air, and 
as millions of them rush along, they 
make a sound like the falling of heavy 
rain. The back of the herring is of 
a greenish blue, and its sides and 
lower parts are covered with silvery 
scales, sometimes marked with fig¬ 
ures which ignorant fishermen look 
upon with wonder. About three 
hundred years ago, two herrings 
were caught off the coast of Norway, 
which had on their sides marks that 
looked some like Gothic letters. 
They were sent to the King of Nor¬ 
way, who turned pale when he saw 
the marks, for he thought they fore¬ 
told his death and that of his queen. 
Learned men were called to look at 
them, and some read them in one 
way and some in another ; but the 
king died the next year, and all the 



Head of Herring. 


people thought that the two herrings 
had been sent from heaven to warn 
him of his coming death. 

The herring is one of the most im¬ 
portant of all fishes, and the herring 
fishery is more valuable than any 
other excepting that of the cod. In 
Northern Europe it is called the great 
fishery, while that of the whale is 
called the little fishery. The wealth 
of Holland was built up chiefly by 
it, and there is a saying in that coun¬ 
try that Amsterdam is founded on 
herring heads. The herring fishery 
is also largely carried on by the 
English, Norwegians, Danes, and 
French in Europe, and by the New 
England States and by Canada in 
America. The chief fisheries here 
are off the coasts of Maine, New¬ 
foundland, and Labrador. 




HICKORY 


302 


HIPPOPOTAMUS 


Herring are caught mostly in drift 
NETS, though some are taken in 
seines. The drift nets, which are 
set usually in the evening, are some¬ 
times a mile long, and reach down 
into the water more than thirty feet, 
or five times the length of a man. 
The herrings try to get through the 
meshes and are caught and held 
tight by the gills. When enough 
have been taken to fill the boats the 
fish are taken to the shore, where 
they are cleaned, salted, and packed 
in barrels. These are called white 
herrings; those which are salted 
and smoked are called red herrings. 
Some which are smoked only a little 
and are intended to be eaten at once 
are called bloaters. 

The word herring is from the 
Anglo-Saxon hering , which is from 
here , an army, and the fish gets its 
name because it moves in such num¬ 
bers. 

HICKORY, a large tree of the 
same family with the WALNUT, 
found only in America. There are 
several kinds, all of which are beau¬ 
tiful and stately trees. The shell- 
bark or shag-bark hickory, so called 
because its shaggy outer bark peels 
off in long strips, bears the common 
hickory nut, which is sometimes 
wrongly called walnut. In the 
Western States grows another kind 
of shell-bark, with nuts twice as 
large as the hickory nut, but they 
are not so sweet. The pecan hick¬ 
ory, which grows in the South-west¬ 
ern States, yields the pecan nut. 
The pig nut is also a kind of hickory. 

The wood of the hickory makes 
the best of fuel and of charcoal. It 
also makes good timber, but rots 
fast from heat and dampness, and is 
much eaten by worms. It is, how¬ 
ever, very tough, and is much used 
for making carriage shafts, wheel 
spokes, whip handles, large screws, 
hoops for casks, etc. 

HIPPOPOTAMUS. This animal 
is found only in Africa. It is 
usually not quite so high as a man, 
but its body is nearly as large as 


that of the elephant. Its legs are 
very short, which makes it awkward 
in its movements. Its skin is as 
much as two inches thick in some 
places, is a dirty brown color, and 
has no hair on it. The hippopot¬ 
amus passes much of its Jime in the 
water of rivers and lakes, especially 
during the day, leaving it at night to 
feed on the grass and herbage along 
the banks. It swims and dives with 
great ease, and can stay a long time 
under water. The female often 
swims with a young one standing on 
her back. The hippopotamus is 
usually harmless, but when attacked 
is dangerous, and will sometimes 
smash a boat to pieces. It is much 
hunted by the Africans for its flesh, 
which is like pork, and for its hide, 
out of which are made shields, hel¬ 
mets, whips, and canes. Hippopot¬ 
amus teeth are large and are much 
valued for their ivory. Dentists 
sometimes make false teeth out of 
them. 

In 1872 a baby hippopotamus was 
born in the Zoological Gardens in 
London, and much has been learned 
about these animals by watching it. 
A few days after its birth its keeper 
was looking at it swimming about in 
the tank with its mother, when all 
at once it dived under the water. 
Its keeper expected to see it come 
up again every minute, but it stayed 
under so long that he began to think 
it was drowned, and he was just 
about to order the water let out of 
the tank, when little “ hippo” came 
up from the bottom, shaking his 
funny little horse-like ears, and look¬ 
ing as bright as if he had only taken 
a dip. Yet he had been under the 
water, without taking breath, for 
nearly twenty minutes. His parents 
had never been known to stay under 
more than three minutes at a time. 
It was afterward found out that the 
little fellow went under water to 
suck, and it is supposed that the 
young of these animals have the 
power of staying under water longer 
than the old ones so that they may 







HOCK 


303 


HOG 


be safe from their enemies while 
they are weak. 

This baby “ hippo” was at first so 
small that he could go through the 
bars of the cage, but he soon grew 
too large for that. When a few 
weeks old,.he was about the size of 
a fat pig, and his hide was of a pink¬ 
ish-slate color. He soon learned to 
know his keeper, and when he had 
had his dinner he was as playful as 
a kitten, jumping about his cage and 
throwing up mouthfuls of hay like a 
oung calf. When he began to cut 
is teeth he used to put his head 
through the bars to have his gums 
rubbed. 

Pictures of the hippopotamus are 
shown on ancient monuments and 
medals. A live one was carried to 
Rome in the first century before 
Christ, and the Emperor Augustus 
also showed one there after his tri¬ 
umph over Cleopatra. Others were 
taken there by later emperors, but 
after the fall of Rome none was 
again seen in Europe until the pres¬ 
ent century, when living ones were 
got for the London, the Paris, and 
other zoological gardens. Within a 
few years one has been shown in the 
United States. They are getting 
very scarce now in Africa, and will 
probably soon be all gone. 

The hippopotamus is a mammal 
of the order pachydennata, or thick- 
skinned animals. 

The word hippopotamus means 
river horse, and is made up of the 
Greek words hippos , horse, and pot- 
amos , river. 

HOCK, a light yellowish wine 
made at Hochheim (from which 
place it takes its name), on the river 
Main, in Germany. It is either still 
or sparkling (see Wine). Spark¬ 
ling hock is made in the same way 
as CHAMPAGNE, and is often sold 
for it. 

HOE, a tool used in gardening 
and farming. There are two kinds 
of hand hoes, draw hoes and push 
hoes. The draw or common hoe is 
used mostly for stirring the soil 


around growing crops, drawing the 
earth up to plants, and clearing 
weeds from among them. In the 
Southern States, where the soil is 
often stiff and hard, very heavy and 
sharp hoes are used. Push hoes are 
used chiefly to cut up weeds and to 
thin out beds of vegetables. The 
horse hoe, now much used in farm¬ 
ing, is made up of a number of 
small hoes fastened to a wooden 
frame, which is drawn by a horse. 
It can only be used to hoe crops 
sown in straight lines called drills, 
between which the horse can walk. 

The word hoe is in French houe , 
which is from houer , to dig up. 

HOG. The hog was not known 
in America and Australia before they 
were settled by white men, and all 
the hogs now in those countries, both 
tame and wild, are descended from 
those which were brought from 
Europe by the early colonists. In 
South America there are immense 
droves o^wild hogs in the forests, 
and in many of the Southern and 
Western States the woods are full 
of half wild ones, which live on 
acorns, beechnuts, and other veg¬ 
etable food. These hogs are much 
cleaner in their habits than tame 
hogs ; indeed, the filth of the do¬ 
mestic hog is largely owing to the 
way in which it is kept, and it will 
always keep its sleeping place clean 
if it can. It wallows in the mud to 
cool its skin and to drive away in¬ 
sects, but elephants and other thick- 
skinned animals do the same thing. 

The wild boar of Europe, which 
belongs to the same family with the 
common hog, is fond of rolling in 
mud, but washes itself when it can 
in ponds or brooks before going to 
its sleeping place. These animals 
are very fierce, and hunting them is 
very exciting and dangerous sport. 
When chased with dogs they run 
away very fast and will not turn out 
of the path for anything; but if 
wounded, will rush upon the hunters 
and fight hard. A wild boar will 
sometimes rip up a dog or a horse 





HOG 


304 


HOOF 


HONE, or WHETSTONE, a hard 

kind of stone with a smooth surface, 
used for sharpening tools. The fin¬ 
est hones are those called oil-stones, 
because they are wet with oil when 
used. The best stone for hones 
comes from Turkey, but a very fine 
kind is brought from Nova Scotia, 
and another kind from Arkansas. 
The coarser hones are usually called 
whetstones, and are wet with water. 
Whetstones for sharpening scythes 
and strips of wood covered with 
emery, used for the same purpose, 
are sometimes called rifles in the 
United States. 

The word hone is from the Nor¬ 
man French hein , whetstone. 
Whetstone is made up of the Anglo- 
Saxon hwettan , to rub, and stein, 
stone. 

HONEY, the sweet juices of plants, 
collected from flowers by honey 


with its long sharp tusks, and some¬ 
times even kill a man. In Germany 
boars are hunted usually by men on 
horseback, with spears, though they 
are sometimes shot. 

Some think the common hog is 
descended from the wild boar, but it 
is not certainly known. The male 
of the hog is called a boar, and the 
female a sow. The young are 
called pigs, and those about half- 
grown shoats. There are many 
different breeds or kinds of hogs, 
mostly made by the different ways 
in which they are brought up and 
fed. Indeed, the tame hog may be 
said to have been almost made by 
man, it differs so much in shape and 
habits from the wild hog. 

The hog is one of the most val¬ 
uable of all animals. Its flesh is 
eaten by most nations in many forms 
as pork, fresh and salted, bacon, 
ham, sausage, etc. ; its fat is made 
into lard ; its skin into leather, used 
by saddlers, harness - makers, and 
trunk-makers ; and its bristles, or 
coarse hairs, are made into many 
kinds of brushes, especially tooth, 
nail, and hair brushes. Great num¬ 
bers of hogs are raised in the West¬ 
ern States, where the killing, cur¬ 
ing, and packing of pork is a very 
large business. The most pork is 
packed in Chicago and Cincinnati, 
more than two million hogs being 
usually killed every year in those 
places. 

In some countries the hog is made 
useful to man during its life. In 
China pigs are harnessed and made 
to draw wagons, and' in some parts 
of France they are taught to hunt 
truffles (see Fungi). In North¬ 
ern France they are tied up to apple 
trees so that they may root up and 
loosen the earth around them. 

The hog is a mammal of the order 
pachydermata , or thick-skinned an¬ 
imals. 

The word hog is spelled hoch in 
the Cornish and Breton languages. 
In the Breton language houc'ha 
means to grunt. 


BEES, and put by them into the cells 
of honey comb. The goodness of 
honey depends somewhat on the 
kind of food of the bees, their age, 
and the weather in which it is made. 
Very sweet flowers give it a pleasant 
smell and taste, while some give it 
not only a bad taste, but even make 
it unsafe to eat. But honey which 
is poisonous to man does not injure 
bees, and so they make it out of 
almost all kinds of flowers. 

Honey is made up of grape SUGAR, 
wax, gum, and some other things. 
From the most ancient times it has 
been an article of food, but it is not 
so much used now as it was before 
sugar was known. The best honey 
is the newest, made by young bees, 
which is a clear fluid in a white 
comb. This is sometimes called vir¬ 
gin honey. As it grows older honey 
gets a yellow or reddish color. 
Honey is used by tobacconists to 
sweeten tobacco with, and from it 
is made a fermented (see Beer) 
drink called honey wine or mead. 

The word honey is from the 
Anglo-Saxon hunig , honey. 

HOOF, the horny covering on the 
feet of horses, cows, sheep, goats, 






HOOK AND EYE 


305 


HORN 


etc. The hoofs of animals, es¬ 
pecially those of cattle, are used to 
make common combs, buttons, and 
handles out of. The hoofs of horses, 
which are coarser than those of cows 
and oxen, are made into glue and 
ground up for manure. A sub¬ 
stance called prussiate of potash, 
used in making Prussian blue for 
dying and calico printing, is also 
made from hoofs. 

The word hoof is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hofy hoof. 

HOOK and EYE. These are 
made out of brass wire by machines 
very like those which make PINS. 
One machine makes hooks and 
another eyes, and each can make 
about 200 every minute. The wire, 
which is wound around a roller, 
is drawn in by nippers, cut off into 
just the right length for a hook or 
an eye, as the case maybe, flattened, 
and bent into shape, all by the ac¬ 
tion of machinery. All the man who 
attends to the machines has to do is 
to see that they have plenty of wire. 
Each hook or eye, as soon as it is 
finished, drops into a box and makes 
room for another. They are silvered 
or tinned afterward in the same way 
as pins. Some hooks and eyes 
are made of iron, and blackened 
with japan varnish. 

The word hook is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hoc . hook ; eye is from the 
Anglo - Saxon eage, the eye with 
which we see, and is so named on 
account of its shape. 

HOPS, the flowers of the hop 
plant, a vine which grows two or 
three times as high as a man. The 
vines are cultivated in large fields, in 
groups of three or four, around tall 
poles, up which they climb. The 
flowers are picked when ripe, dried 
on hair screens in kilns, and packed 
in large bags or bales. Hops are 
used principally in making beer. 
They give to it its bitter taste, make 
it bright and clear, and help to keep 
it from souring. 

The word hop is in Danish hop , 
and in German hopfen. 


HORN. Horn is different from 
bone. The antlers of the stag are 
bone, and not horn, and they ought 
not to be called horns. Horn is 
made up of coagulated, or thickened, 
ALBUMEN, GELATINE, and phos¬ 
phate of lime. There is just enough 
of the lime in it to make it hard 
without being too brittle , and just 
enough of gelatine to make it easy 
to cut and mould when heated. 

The horns most used in manufac¬ 
tures are those of the ox, cow, bison, 
buffalo, sheep, goat, and antelope. 
Most horns have a bony core, which 
is got out by soaking them in water 
five or six weeks. This core is 
ground up and made into little 
crucibles called “ cupels,” used for 
melting gold and silver in. The tips 
of the horns, which are solid, are 
then sawn off, to be used in making 
knife handles, buttons, etc. The re¬ 
mainder, or hollow part, is easily 
softened by soaking it in boiling 
water for half an hour, when it is 
slit open with a knife, spread out flat, 
and pressed between iron plates. 
If the “ flats,” as they are called, 
are pressed very hard, they can 
easily be separated into several thin 
plates, which are scraped and 
smoothed and sometimes put into 
lanterns instead of glass. In old 
times horn plates were used for win¬ 
dow-glass. For making combs and 
other things horn is pressed but 
little, as too much pressure makes 
the teeth split. It is easily colored 
so as to look like tortoise shell, and 
sometimes can scarcely be told from 
it. 

Horn when heated may be mould¬ 
ed into almost any shape, which it 
will keep when cold. In making 
knife and fork handles, buttons, and 
other small things, the pieces are 
cut of the right size, softened in hot 
water, and then screwed up in 
moulds, which shape the horn and 
press upon it any letters or figures 
that may be on the inside of the 
moulds. In about twenty minutes 
the horn is taken out and is then 





HORN 


306 


HORNET 


ready to be polished, which is done 
with ROTTEN STONE and oil. Even 
the parings, scrapings, and other 
little pieces of horn may be softened 
and pressed into different forms. 

The word horn is Anglo-Saxon, 
and comes from the Latin cornu , 
horn. 

HORN, a wind musical instru¬ 
ment, used in ORCHESTRAS and mil¬ 
itary bands. It gets its name from 
the ’fact that the first horns were 
made from the horns of animals. 
The kind now used most is called 
the French horn. This, which is 
usually made of brass, is a tube, 
nearly twice as long as a man, coiled 
up in several rings, so as to be 
easier to handle, and having a large 
bell - shaped end. It is blown 
through a cup-shaped mouth-piece, 
and the right sounds are made partly 
by the lips, partly by the breath, 
and partly by putting the hand into 
the large end. The Sax-horn is a 
much improved kind of horn, first 
made by Sax of Paris. It is the one 
generally used in orchestras. 

The cornet-a-pistons (horn with 
pistons) is a small kind of horn, 
fitted with valves and pistons so 
that quick music can be played on it. 
It makes sweet sounds, but its notes 
are not so noble as those of the horn, 
nor so deep as those of the trumpet. 
It is much used, however, in orches¬ 
tras, often as a solo instrument. 

HORNBLENDE, a common rock, 
sometimes found by itself and some¬ 
times mixed with other stones. It 
is of all colors, from white through 
different shades of green to black, 
but usually only the very dark green 
or black kind is called by this name. 
It is sometimes found in granite 
instead of MICA, and then the gran¬ 
ite is called syenite. Hornblende is 
made up mostly of silica (see Sili¬ 
con), united with MAGNESIA, lime, 
or iron. 

Asbestus is a kind of hornblende 
which splits up into fine fibres or 
threads, much like those of flax. 
These threads have been woven 


into cloth which will not burn in 
any common flame. It has there¬ 
fore been much used for making fire¬ 
proof roofs, floors, safe-linings,lamp- 
wicks, and clothes. In ancient 
times bodies which were burned on 
the funeral pile were wrapped up in 
cloths made of asbestus, so that the 
ashes of the dead might not become 
mixed with the wood ashes. Asbes¬ 
tus is found in Italy, Switzerland, 
Scotland, and on Staten Island and 
some other places in this country. 

The word hornblende is from 
HORN and the German blende, blind¬ 
ing or dazzling, and the rock is so 
called because it splits like horn and 
shines. Asbestus is from the Greek 
asbestos , which means something 
which cannot be burned. 

HORNET. The hornet belongs 
to the same family with the WASP, 
but is larger and stronger. It builds 
its nest on the branch of a tree, out 
of a kind of brown paper which it 
makes from bits of wood and bark. 
It makes the paper in much the 
same way as human paper-makers 
do, by first turning the wood into 
pulp and then spreading it out in 
thin layers to dry. The outer wall 
of the nest is made of many layers 
of paper, and the cells inside, which 
are like the cells in honey-comb, are 
made in separate floors, with the 
mouths downward, and hung one 
under another by 
strong rods of 
paper. A part 
of one of these 
floors with the 
rod which fastens 
it to the floor 
above it, is shown 
in the picture. 

The hornet lives 
on fruits, honey, 
and insects, es¬ 
pecially flies. It does not make 
honey itself, but steals it from honey 
bees. Hornets live in societies made 
up of males, females, and workers, 
like bees. The females and the 
workers, which do all the work, are 



Part of Hornet’s 
Nest. 





HORSE 


307 


HORSE 


armed with sharp stings, and they 
fiercely attack and sting any one 
who disturbs their nest, making a 
painful wound. 

The hornet belongs to the order 
hymenoptera, or membrane-winged 
INSECTS. 

The word hornet is from the 
Anglo-Saxon hyrnet , which is from 
hyrne . horn ; and the insect is so 
called because its feelers look like 
horns. 

HORSE. It is not known from 
what country the horse first came, 
but it is thought to have been first 
tamed in Central Asia. The ASS, 
which is hardier and lives on cheaper 
food, was used before it as a beast 
of burden and for riding; and 
even after the horse was tamed, it 
was for a long time ridden in the 
East only in war. The Assyrians 
and the Egyptians both drove and 
rode horses at a very early date. 
The Scythians, who probably 
learned the use of the animal from 
the Egyptians, were among the earli¬ 
est horsemen, and it was from them 
that the Greeks first heard of the 
horse. When the Greeks first saw 
mounted Scythians they were struck 
with fear, for they thought that the 
horse and his rider were one animal ; 
and from this probably grew the 
story of the Centaurs. 

The horse is one of the most in¬ 
telligent of animals. Its senses of 
hearing and of smell are strong, its 
sight is excellent and it can see by 
night much better than a man. It 
has a very strong memory and easily 
finds again a road which it has once 
travelled over or a place it has once 
visited. It knows its master well, 
and if kindly treated will always do 
its work willingly and cheerfully. 
Indeed, it often takes as much pride 
and pleasure in its work as the one 
who drives or rides it : the racer 
knows its business and strives to 
win, the hunter follows the hounds 
with the greatest zeal, and the war 
horse rejoices in the sound of the 
bugle and of military music. Horses 


can be trained also to do many won¬ 
derful things, and some in circuses 
perform feats which seem to require 
much thought and judgment. 

The horse sometimes lives to be 
thirty years old, but it is seldom of 
use for more than fifteen or sixteen 
years. The male horse is called a 
stallion, the female a mare ; the 
young when first born is called a 
foal, and afterward a colt ; and the 
female colt is usually called a filly. 
Colts are commonly broken to har¬ 
ness when three years old. 

Wild Horses. There were no 
horses in America when it was 
settled by white men, and when the 
Indians saw the Spaniards mounted 
upon them they were as much afraid 
of them as the Greeks had been of 
the Scythians. There are now a 
great many wild horses in South 
America and in the south-western 
parts of North America, but they 
are all descendants of horses brought 
from Europe by the Spaniards and 
other early colonists. In South 
America these wild horses live in 
great herds of many thousands each 
on the plains called pampas. Dur¬ 
ing the dry season they travel toward 
the rivers for water, and many are 
often trampled to death at the drink¬ 
ing places. Wolves and other wild 
beasts sometimes attack wild horses, 
but the horses drive them off with 
kicks, and only the sick and weak 
ones are killed. 

Wild horses can be tamed and 
made useful to man, but it is very 
hard work to subdue them. The 
Spaniards and Indians take them by 
surrounding a herd and driving them 
into a large yard called a corral, 
where they are caught one by one 
and ridden until they are tired out. 
Their spirits are thus broken, and 
they do not afterward try to escape. 
They are caught in the corral with 
either the lasso or the bolas. The 
lasso is a long rope made of plaited 
hide, with an iron ring on one end, 
through which the other end is drawn 
so as to make a slip-noose. When 





HORSE 


308 


HORSE 


a horse is wanted a man rides into 
the corral on a steady horse, carry¬ 
ing a lasso coiled up in his left hand, 
the end of it being fastened to his 
SADDLE-girth. He then takes the 
slip-noose end in his right hand, with 
about twelve feet of the lasso, 
swings it round his head a few times, 
and throws it at the horse wanted. 
The weight of the iron ring carries 
the lasso out its full length, and the 
slip-noose falls over the horse’s head 
and catches it by the neck, when the 
horseman draws it out of the corral. 
The South Americans who live on 
the great plains use the lasso so 
well that they can easily catch a 
horse running at full speed either 
around the neck or the legs. The 
lasso is also much used in Mexico 
and Texas to catch the wild horses 
and cattle of those countries. 

In the southern part of South 
America the bolas is more used than 
the lasso. The bolas is made of two 
balls, usually of lead, covered with 
leather and joined together by a 
plaited rope six to eight feet long. 
The horseman holds one of the balls 
in his right hand and whirls the other 
round his head. When it is going 
fast enough he suddenly lets go and 
the bolas shoots through the air and 
winds round the legs of the horse he 
is chasing, so that it is at once 
stopped and generally thrown down. 
The horseman then jumps off of his 
own horse, wraps his cloak round 
the wild horse’s head, so that it can¬ 
not see, puts a bit into its mouth, 
mounts it, and rides it until it is 
tired out. 

The wild horses of South America 
are called in that country para 7 tieros, 
but those of Mexico are called mus¬ 
tangs. There are also wild horses in 
Tartary called tar pans, whose hab¬ 
its are much the same as those in 
America, and a few wild ones are 
found in Northern Africa. 

Parts of the Horse. Every child 
should know how a horse is made, 
for this noble animal, at once the 
companion and servant of man, can¬ 


not be well understood without a 
knowledge of its parts. Something 
of this can be learned from the pic¬ 
ture, in which both the skeleton and 
the outer parts are shown. The 
skeleton is made up of the bones of 
the head ; the vertebral column or 
spine (see Animal), made up of 
many small bones jointed together, 
reaching from the head down 
through the neck and across the 
back to the end of the tail ; the ribs ; 
the shoulder blade and the haunch ; 
and the bones which form the legs. 
In the picture the letters refer to the 
bones of the skeleton and the figures 
to the outer parts of the horse. 

In the head can be seen the way 
the teeth grow, the cutting teeth be¬ 
ing in front, and the grinding or 
chewing teeth behind, with a space 
between them where there are no 
teeth. This space, called the bar, 
is very useful, for in it the bit is put, 
and Ihe horse can thus shut its 
mouth with the bit in it. The cut¬ 
ting teeth are twelve in number, six 
in each jaw, and there are six grind¬ 
ing teeth on each side in both jaws. 
The second teeth begin to come be¬ 
tween the second and third year. 
The age of a horse can be told by 
the marks in its teeth, which change 
a little every year until the animal is 
about nine years old, but after it 
gets beyond that age, it is hard to 
tell certainly how old it is. 

The principal parts of the body of 
the horse are : 1, the chest; 2, the 
withers, or place where the shoulders 
meet above ; 3, the barrel, or part 
of the body shut in by the ribs ; 4, 
the flanks ; 5, the loins ; and 6, the 
buttocks. The tail is made up of two 
parts, the bone and flesh part, called 
the dock, and the hair. 

Of the bones, a is the shoulder- 
blade, and b the haunch or hip-bone. 
In the forelegs, /, which is the same 
as the upper arm bone in man, is 
called the humerus ; and k , which is 
the same as the bone of the forearm 
in man, is the radius ; the joint be¬ 
tween the two is the elbow. The 




HORSE 


309 


HORSE 


joint i, below the humerus, is the 
knee, and the part h, below the 
knee, the shank. The parts marked 
g make up the fore pastern and the 
foot. The hind legs are each made 
up of the thigh t ; the stifle-joint c ; 
the leg-bone or shin-bone d; the 
hock s; the metatarsal bone, or 
bone between the ankle and the 
foot; and f the hind pastern and 
foot. From this it will be seen that 
the part of the foreleg from the 
knee, z, down to the end of the foot 
is the same as the wrist and hand in 


the skeleton of man, and the part of 
the hind leg from the hock j to the 
end of the foot is the same as the 
ankle and foot of man. 

The horse has but one toe on each 
foot, but in the early ages of the 
world, before the time of man, there 
were horses both in Europe and 
America which had several toes. 
We know this from the fossil re¬ 
mains found in rocks. In one kind 
there were four toes on the fore feet 
and three on the hind feet, and in 
another three toes on each. All of 



Skeleton of the Horse. 


these ancient horses were very small, 
one kind being no larger than a fox, 
and another about the size of a 
sheep. In later times there were 
horses in America much like those 
of the present day, but they had all 
died long before this country was dis¬ 
covered, and probably long before 
any people lived here. 

Colors of the Horse. Horses are 
of several colors, all of which have 
names given to them. A bay horse 
is of a reddish-brown color : dark 
bay is a dark nut-brown, and light 


bay a yellowish red. A horse is 
said to be dappled bay when it has 
spots on the rump darker than on 
the rest of the body. All bay 
horses have black manes and tails, 
and dark bay ones usually have the 
legs below the knees and hocks 
black. Some horses are of so dark 
a brown as to be nearly black, but 
the real black horse is almost coal 
black. A chestnut horse is a light 
red or cinnamon - colored bay, but 
some are darker. Some chestnut 
horses have white or yellowish-white 








HORSE 


310 


HORSE 


manes and tails, and others have 
black ones. The roan horse is a 
mixture of red and white or black 
and white in spots ; when the colors 
are in patches, the horse is said to 
be pied or piebald. Dun-colored 
horses are of a yellowish sandy hue, 
with white or black tails. There are 
several kinds of grays : the silver 
gray, which is nearly white ; the iron 
gray, which has more black hairs 
than white; and the dappled gray, 
which is marked with spots and 
blotches of black or dark gray. A 
horse which has small black spots 
on a white or gray coat is called flea- 
bitten. 

Gaits of the Horse. The horse 
has many gaits: it walks, trots, 
gallops, and ambles or paces. 
When a horse walks it appears to 
move one forefoot and one hind 
foot on different sides together, and 
then the other two, but it really 
moves only one foot at a time. If 
the left hind leg is first raised, the 
left forefoot is taken up just before 
the hind foot touches the ground ; 
the right hind foot is then raised, 
and then the right forefoot. In trot¬ 
ting, the movement is much quick¬ 
er, and two legs are moved at once, 
one on one side and one on the 
other. In the gallop, the two front 
legs are moved nearly at the same 
time, and the two hind ones are 
then brought up quickly and nearly 
together. The canter is a slow kind 
of gallop which is taught the horse. 
In the amble or pace two legs • on 
the same side are moved together, 
and then the two on the other side. 
Wild horses only trot and gallop, 
and these are the only gaits known 
to the Arabian horse. 

Breeds of Horses. Almost every 
country has its own breed of horses, 
suited to the climate and to the 
wants of its people. The horses of 
cold and bleak countries are small 
and rough - haired, and they have 
thicker skins than those of warm 
climates, which are larger and 
sleeker. The horses of Iceland are 


small, with thick shaggy hair. They 
are nearly wild, being allowed by 
their masters to feed on the moun¬ 
tains where they please, and are 
caught only when they are wanted. 
The wild tarpans of Tartary are not 
much larger than common mules, 
and in the winter their hair is so long 
and thick that it feels like a bear’s 
fur. Herds of these horses are often 
caught in snow storms along the 
north shores of the Black Sea, and 
losing their way rush out on the ice, 
where many break through and are 
drowned. 

The Arabian Horse is one of the 
finest of all horses. For hundreds 
of years it has been bred with the 
greatest care, and the Arab takes as 
much pains to preserve the history 
of his horse as noble families do that 
of their children. He brings it up 
too as one of his family, sharing his 
tent with it and feeding it from his 
own hand. He often sleeps with his 
head pillowed upon its neck, and his 
children make a pet of it, and roll 
about upon it when lying down with¬ 
out getting hurt. As soon as a colt’s 
back gets strong enough it is taught 
to carry a boy. Afterward, as it 
grows larger, it is made to carry a 
heavier boy, and then a youth, its 
burden being thus added to little by 
little, until at last it is able to bear 
the weight of a full-grown man. 
The Arab always rides a mare, be¬ 
cause she does not neigh as a horse 
does when coming near other horses, 
and he can therefore ride near the 
homes of his enemies in the night 
without being found out. He will 
often sell a horse, but it is very sel¬ 
dom that he will sell his mare. He 
may be ragged and hungry, but he 
will part with his life sooner than 
with what is as dear to him as one 
of his children. A story is told of 
an old Arab who had a valuable 
mare which had carried him for fif¬ 
teen years in many a march and 
battle. At length, when he was 
eighty years old, he gave her, with a 
sword which had been his father’s, 






HORSE 


HORSE 


3ii 


to his eldest son, and told him never 
to lie down to rest at night until he 
had rubbed them both as smooth as 
a looking-glass. In the first fight in 
which the son rode the mare he was 
killed, and the mare fell into the 
hands of the enemy. When the old 
man heard the news, he said that 
life was not worth preserving, for he 
had lost both his son and his mare, 
and he died in a few days. 

The Barb or Barbary Horse of 
Northern Africa is much like the 
Arabian, but is smaller, and has 
less spirit and speed. The Moors 
carried many of these horses into 
Spain, and from them are descended 
the Andalusian horse called the jen¬ 
net and other breeds of horses in 
Spain. In old times Spanish horses 
were better than they are now, and 
were much prized everywhere for 
saddle horses, one kind being the 
favorite war-horse of knights. 

The English Horse, from which 
the best horses in the United States 
have come, has much Arabian and 
Barb blood in it. The race horse is 
swifter for short distances than the 
best Arabian horse. It is much 
like the Arabian in looks, but is tall¬ 
er and longer, and has changed in 
color. The Arabian horse is gen¬ 
erally white, light gray, or flea-bitten, 
but the race horse is more usually 
bay and chestnut. The changes 
have probably come from the differ¬ 
ence in the climate and in the way 
the horses are brought up. The 
American race horse is descended 
from the English race horse, and is 
therefore also of Arabian blood. 
The fastest mile ever run by a race 
horse in the United States up to 
1879 was made by the horse named 
Ten Broeck, in one minute and thirty- 
nine and three quarter (1:39!) sec¬ 
onds. 

The Trotting Horse of the United 
States and Canada is the fastest in 
the world. It is not a thoroughbred 
horse, or a horse of pure racing 
blood, like the racehorse, but is gen¬ 
erally a descendant of a cross be¬ 


tween the race horse and some com¬ 
mon breed ; but a few thoroughbred 
racing horses have been taught to 
trot very fast. It is not usually as 
tall as the running horse, and is 
sometimes small. There is also a 
good breed of trotting horses in 
Russia, called the Orloff trotter, 
which is faster than common horses, 
but not so fast as the American 
trotter. The fastest mile ever trot¬ 
ted in the United States up to 1879 
was made by the horse named Ra- 
rus, in two minutes and thirteen and 
one quarter (2:13^) seconds. 

Draught Horses, or horses used 
for drawing heavy loads, are raised 
in many countries. In France the 
Percheron breed has been noted for 
hundreds of years. Many of them 
are to be seen in Paris, where they 
are much used for drawing omni¬ 
buses and business wagons, and 
some of them are used in the United 
States. They are large, heavy 
horses, with large heads. In Eng¬ 
land the breeds called the Suffolk, 
the Cleveland Bay, and the Clydes¬ 
dale are noted for their size and 
strength. The Flanders horse, of 
Belgium and Holland, is very large, 
heavy, and strong. Many of the 
great horses used by brewers in Lon¬ 
don and Paris are of this breed. 

All these breeds are called heavy 
draught horses, because they are 
used in the heaviest kinds of trucks 
and large wagons. There are also 
light draught horses, for drawing 
lighter loads, which are not quite so 
heavy in the body and are quicker in 
their motions. The carriage horse 
is of a lighter and more elegant form 
than the common draught horse, but 
is generally large and strong. The 
saddle horse should be a little small¬ 
er than the carriage horse, and 
should be graceful and active in all 
its movements. It should be taught 
not only to obey the rein, but to un¬ 
derstand every motion of its rider. 

Ponies are found in many coun¬ 
tries. Among the most noted are 
the Shetland ponies, raised in the 




HORSE CHESTNUT 


312 


HORSESHOE CRAB 


islands of the same name, north of 
Scotland, where they are called Shel- 
ties. Some of these little horses are 
not much larger than a great dog, 
but they are very strong, and will 
carry a man with ease. The Indians 
of the western parts of the United 
States have a breed of ponies which 
are very hardy and strong. One of 
them will travel all day long with a 
heavy man on its back. 

Uses. The horse is useful to man 
not only during life, but is very val¬ 
uable also after death. Its flesh is 
sold in Europe as food for dogs and 
cats, and in some countries it is used 
as food for man. In Tartary, where 
the chief wealth of many tribes of 
people is in their horses, the milk 
of mares is used just as we use cows’ 
milk, and a kind of strong drink 
called koumiss is made from it. 
The hide of the horse is made into 
leather, much used for gloves and 
for covering office chairs and sofas, 
and the hair of its mane and tail is 
used for stuffing mattresses, saddles, 
and horse collars, and for making 
hair cloth, sieves, fishing lines, and 
the bows of violins. Its bones are 
made into buttons, ground for ma¬ 
nure, and burned for bone black, its 
hoofs are boiled for glue, and its in¬ 
testines are used for many purposes. 

The horse is a MAMMAL of the 
order pachydermata , or thick- 
skinned animals, and belongs to a 
family which includes also the ass 
and the zebra. 

Our word horse comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon hors , horse. 

HORSE CHESTNUT, a handsome 
tree, raised chiefly for ornament, as 
its wood is soft and not worth much. 
It bears large spikes of showy white 
flowers, and a fruit or nut covered 
with a thick prickly shell which 
splits into three parts before it falls. 
The nuts are bitter, and though cat¬ 
tle, horses, sheep, and swine will eat 
them, they are not fit for food for 
man ; but in France they have a 
way of taking the bitter taste out of 
them, and they then make them into 


a kind of meal which is much eaten 
by common people. The bark of 
the tree is sometimes used in tan¬ 
ning leather, and the rind of the 
seeds and the outer husk have been 
employed in dyeing. A kind of 
horse chestnut which grows in the 
Western States is called the buckeye. 

The horse chestnut is so called 
because it used to be ground into 
meal and fed to horses. 

HORSE RADISH, a plant cultivated 
for the sake of its root, which is 
used on the table as a seasoning for 
meats. The root is grated and put 
up in bottles with vinegar. It has a 
sharp biting taste, which comes from 
a kind of oil in it, much like the oil 
in mustard seed. 

HORSESHOE. Horseshoes 
were once always made by hand, 
and still are in many country places 
by blacksmiths, who hammer them 
into shape upon anvils ; but most of 
them are now made by machinery. 
A bar of iron of the right size is 
heated red hot, and put into the 
machine between two rollers. The 
machine cuts off enough for one 
shoe, bends it round, stamps it with 
DIES which give it shape and make 
the groove around it for the nail 
heads, and drops it out all ready for 
the nail holes, which are punched in 
it by hand. Each machine will 
make about sixty horse shoes every 
minute. 

HORSESHOE CRAB or KING 
CRAB. This animal gets its first 
name from its shape, and its second 
name from its size. It is usually 
called horseshoe or horse-foot crab 
in this country, but in the East India 
Islands, where it grows to be two or 
three feet broad, it is called king 
crab. The common horseshoe crab 
is found all along the Atlantic coast 
of the New England and the Middle 
States, and its cast-off shells are often 
seen on the sands. The shell is in 
two parts, a rounded piece in front 
and a nearly three-cornered piece be¬ 
hind, fitted to it by a kind of hinge. 
To the back end is jointed a long 





HOUR GLASS 


3 i 3 


HOUSE 


sharp tail, the one use of which 
seems to be to help the crab turn 
over when it gets on to its back. 
But the animal uses it also in dig¬ 
ging, for it loves to burrow out of 
sight into the mud and sand. In 
doing this, it bends down forward the 
sharp front piece of its shell, bend¬ 
ing down backward the other piece 
so as to push against the ground 
with its tail, while its feet throw out 
the dirt on both sides. It can thus 
soon force its body under the sand. 
In the East Indies the Malays point 
their spears with these sharp tails. 

The mouth of a horseshoe crab 
is in the middle of its under part, be¬ 
tween its legs, which grow out all 
round it. The parts of several of 
the first pairs of legs are fitted with 
rough points with which the crab 
grinds up its food before it swallows 
it ; so its teeth are really on its legs. 
It has two large eyes on top of its 
shell, and two others in front, so it 
can see all around. 

Horseshoe crabs are hatched from 
eggs laid in May or June. When 
the tide is high, the female scoops 
a hole in the sand just at the 
edge of the water, lays her eggs in 
it, and leaves them to be covered by 
the sand and hatched by the heat of 
the sun. When born, the little crab 
is only about a quarter of an inch 
wide, and has a shell but no tail. It 
soon outgrows its shell, which splits 
open in front and lets it out. A 
new and larger shell grows in place 
of the old one, and this one has a 
little sharp tail. So it goes on, as 
long as it lives, splitting open its old 
shell in front, creeping out, and get¬ 
ting new ones. 

The horseshoe crab is a CRUSTA¬ 
CEAN of the order dekapoda , or ten¬ 
footed animals. Lobsters, other 
crabs, crawfish, and shrimps belong 
to the same order. 

HOUR GLASS, an instrument 
for measuring time. It is made of 
glass and has two parts joined to¬ 
gether by a narrow neck : one of 
the parts is filled with dry sand, of 


which there is just enough to run 
through the neck in an hour. 
When all the sand has run through, 
it may be turned over and the sand 
allowed to run the other way. It 
does not keep good time, because in 
hot weather the glass swells some, so 
that the neck is larger than in cold 
weather, and the sand is not always 
of the same dryness. There are 
also half-hour glasses and minute 
glasses ; and some are made to run 
just three minutes and are often 
called egg glasses, because they are 
used to time the boiling of eggs. 
Mercury is sometimes used in them 
instead of sand. 

HOUSE. In building a house the 
first thing is to get a good foundation, 
on which it is to stand. Unless a 
solid foundation is made the house 
will not stand even a great while, 
but will be apt to settle in some 
places more than in others, and this 
will cause the plastering of the walls 
to crack, and the doors and win¬ 
dows to sag or lean so that they will 
not open and shut easily. It is some¬ 
times hard to get a good foundation. 
The best bottom for one is solid 
rock or closely-packed gravel, and if 
these are not found on the surface * 
of the ground the earth has to be 
dug away until a good bottom is 
reached. Sometimes a solid bottom 
cannot be got even by digging, and 
then one has to be made. This may 
be done in many ways : sometimes 
heavy planks or beams of wood are 
laid down, sometimes a thick layer 
of concrete, or broken stone and 
cement, is spread over the bottom, 
and sometimes it is necessary to 
drive PILES down until they reach 
firm ground. When piles are driv¬ 
en, the tops are afterward cut off 
even, and the bed thus made is cov¬ 
ered with a platform or flooring of 
planks, on which the stone wall is 
built. 

Masonry. After the foundation, 
the next thing is the masonry, or 
the making of the wall on which 
the building is to rest. The 







HOUSE 


3i4 


HOUSE 


masonry may be of either stone or 
brick, or of both stone and brick. 
The wall under a building is usually 
built of better and more regular 
stones on the outside than on the 
inside, especially in that part of it 
which is above the ground. The 
outside of such a wall is called the 
face, shown in a , 
Fig. 1 ; the inside 
the backing, shown 
in b ; and the mid¬ 
dle part, or part 
between the face 
and the backing, 
which is usually 
filled in with small 
stones, as in c, the 
filling. 

Each layer of 
stone or brick in a 
wall is called a course. The lower 
course, which rests on the founda¬ 
tion, and which is usually wider 
than the courses above it, is called 
the footing, and the top course, 
which is made up of longer and bet¬ 
ter stones than the other courses, is 
called the coping. In the picture, 
Fig 2, a part of the coping is shown 
in c. Stones in which the long 
sides are laid lengthwise in a course, 
as in a a, Fig. 2, are called stretchers, 


one shall come between the two in 
the course next below. Walls may 
be laid with or without MORTAR. 
When without mortar, the work is 
called dry masonry. Masonry of 
rough stones laid dry is called rough 
wall, and when laid in mortar, rubble 
work ; but sometimes all rough work 
is called rubble work. Masonry of cut 
stone, in which each stone is squared 
and dressed to fit, is called ashlar 
masonry. In common cut-work 
only the face is made ashlar, and the 
backing of rubble or brick. 

If the house is to be of stone or of 
brick the walls are built up to the 
roof, the parts above being much 
narrower than the foundation walls, 




Fig. 1.—End of 
Foundation Wall. 



Fig. 2.—Side of Foundation Wall 


and those whose long sides are laid 
across a wall so as to bind it to¬ 
gether, as in b b, are called headers 
or bond stones. The cracks be¬ 
tween the stones are called joints, 
and masonry is always so laid that 
no up and down joint shall run 
across two courses, but that each 


Fig. 3.—Wooden House Frame. 

and holes being left in the proper 
places for the floor-beams ; but if it 
is to be of wood the wall is carried 
up only a little way above the sur¬ 
face of the ground. In building a 
wooden house, the next thing to do 
after the foundation wall is done is 
to put up the frame. Heavy beams 
called sills are first laid on top of the 
foundation walls, and then the 
joists, or thin beams on which the 
lower floor is to be nailed, are fitted 
on to these ; but sometimes the 
joists are laid across on the wall it¬ 
self, the spaces between them filled 
in with stone even with their tops, 
and the sills then laid on them. 

The Frame is usually fitted to- 



















































































HOUSE 


3i5 


HOUSE 


gether on the ground, fastened with 
wooden pins, and then raised, one 
side at a time, and set into holes 
made for its different parts in the 
sills. The parts of a frame may be 
understood from the picture, Fig. 3, 
which shows one side of the frame 
of a house. In this the beams 
marked AAA are the posts ; E is 
the sill ; B is the plate or wall-plate ; 
C is one of the gfrts ; D D are 
braces ; F F are the window-posts 
or window - studs ; and G G are 
studs. The joists for the upper 
floors are fitted on to the girts. When 
floors are so large that it is not safe 
to use single joists, a large beam, 
called a girder, is put across the 
middle, and the ends of the joists 
are fitted into it on each side. The 
floor boards are nailed on to the up¬ 
per side of the joists, and laths are 
nailed on to the under side to hold 
the plaster of the ceiling of the room 
below. Partitions are made by set¬ 
ting up studs the right distance 
apart for the laths. 

Roofs are made in many different 
ways. In cities brick and stone 
buildings often have flat or nearly 
flat roofs, but in the country roofs 
are usually made slanting, so as to 
carry off rain and snow easily. 
A simple kind of frame for a roof is 
shown in the picture, Fig. 4. In 
this, B B are the ends of the two 
wall-plates, the side of one of which 
is shown in Fig. 3. The beam 
T, which is fastened on to the 



Fig. 4.—Collar Roof Frame, 

plates by notches, is called the tie- 
beam, so called because it ties the 
walls together, and keeps them from 
being pushed out by the weight 
of the roof. On top of the tie-beam, 


at the ends, are laid smaller beams 
called pole-plates, P P, on which are 
fastened by notches the rafters R R. 
To keep the rafters from spread¬ 
ing, a small tie-beam called a collar, 
C, is fastened on to the rafters, 



which are also held together at the 
top by a thin beam, F, called the 
ridge-pole. 

Another kind of common frame 
for a roof is shown in Fig. 5. In 
this the parts marked with the same 
letters are the same as in Fig. 4 ; 
but instead of a collar a piece called 
a king-post, K, is put in between 
the tie-beam and the top of the 
rafters, and two other pieces called 
braces or struts, S S, are placed so 
as to brace the rafters. Such a roof 
frame is called a king-truss. Still 
another kind of frame, called a 
queen-truss, has two posts set up be¬ 
tween the tie-beam and the rafters, 
one on each side, instead of a single 
one in the middle. 

On the outside of the rafters rough 
boards called “ battens” are nailed, 
and on these are nailed the shingles, 
slates, or tiles, which form the outer 
covering of the roof. The chimneys 
are usually built before the roof 
is finished, so that the parts of the 
roof around them may be made tight. 
Roofs are of many different shapes 
on the outside, several of which are 
shown in the pictures. Fig. 6 is 
called a pent roof, from the French 
word pente , which means slope. It 
is sometimes also called a shed roof, 
because used for covering sheds. 
In New England a shed with such 
a roof is often seen built on the back 
of old houses, and is there called a 
44 lean-to,” because the rafters lean 
against the main building. 














HOUSE 


HUMBLE BEE 


316 


The gable roof, so called because 
its two ends form gables pointed 
like a triangle, is shown in Fig. 7. 
This is the most common kind of 
roof. A roof with double gables, as 
in Fig. 8, is called an M roof, from 
the shape of its ends. Such a roof 



Fig. 6. Fig. 7. 

Pent Roof. Gable Roof. 


is oftener seen on barns than on 
houses. A roof in which the points 
of the gables are cut off, so that it 
slants on all four sides, as in Fig. 9, 
is called a hip roof. A curb roof, 
Fig 10, is so made that another 
story is formed above the wall- 
plates. This roof is commonly called 



Fig. 8. Fig. 9. 

M Roof. Hip Roof. 


the Mansard roof, after a French 
architect of that name, who often 
put it on houses which he built. It 
is now often built on villas and hand¬ 
some country houses. The ogee 
roof, Fig. 11, is not much used, ex¬ 
cepting on pavilions, summer 
houses, etc. 



Fig. 10. Fig. 11. 

Curb Roof. Ogee Roof. 


The Sides of the house are usually 
first covered with rough boards 
nailed on diagonally or cornerwise, 
and the clapboards are then 
nailed on to these ; but in the best 
houses, layers of felt, paper, or some 
other water-proof material are put on 
between the rough boards and the 
clapboards. Doors, window-frames, 


and blinds are usually made at fac¬ 
tories. 

In many places, when anew house 
is to be built, the neighbors gather 
together to aid in raising the frame. 
At such a gathering, which is called 
a “ house-raising,” there is usually 
much merriment, and after the frame 
is up, and the wooden pins which 
hold it have been driven in, refresh¬ 
ments are served by the owner. It 
is also customary in Germany, and 
in some places in England and in 
this country, to fasten a green bush 
or small tree to the gable. 

The word house is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon hits, house. 

HUCKLEBERRY, HURTLE- 
BERRY, or WHORTLEBERRY, the 
fruit of a shrub of the heath family. 
Huckleberry bushes grow wild 
almost all over the United States, 
and great quantities of the berries 
are picked by women and children 
for market. There are several 
kinds, among which are the black 
huckleberry, called crackers in New 
Jersey, because they have tough 
skins which crack when broken be¬ 
tween the teeth ; the dwarf blue¬ 
berry, seldom more than a foot 
high ; and the swamp blueberry, 
which grows sometimes higher than 
a man. The bilberry, called in 
Scotland blaeberry, is the same as 
the blueberry. 

The word hurtleberry or whortle¬ 
berry is from the Anglo-Saxon heort- 
berie, hartberry, from heort , hart or 
stag, and berie, berry. Huckle¬ 
berry, which has been changed from 
the other names, is now the most 
common name for the fruit. 

HUMBLE BEE, or BUMBLE 
BEE, a kind of bee which gets its 
name from the humming noise it 
makes when flying. It is larger than 
the honey bee, different in its colors, 
being usually yellow and black, and 
hairy both on its legs and body. 
Humble bees live in smaller compa¬ 
nies than honey bees, and they do 
not lay up any honey for food. 
They are divided into three kinds, 






















HUMMING BIRD 


3i7 


HUMMING BIRD 


workers, which are the smallest, 
males, which are larger, and females, 
which are larger than the males. 

There are usually several females 
or queens in each nest. The workers 
and the males die late in the autumn, 
but the queens creep under moss or 
leaves, or into some old nest, and 
lie there in a numb state through 
the winter. In the spring they 
awaken from their long sleep, and 
each one may be seen looking round 
for some hole or crevice in the 
ground where she may make her 
nest. As soon as a queen finds a 
place to suit, she collects some pol¬ 
len and honey from flowers, puts 
it in the nest, and lays in it seven to 
fourteen eggs. She keeps adding to 
the mass of pollen until the young 
are hatched from the eggs. The 
young or larvae live on the pollen, 
and as soon as they are of full size 
they spin silk around themselves ; 
the old bees cover this with a thin 
coat of wax, which makes it into a 
tough cell. The larvae change into 
pupae (see Insects) and stay in these 
cells until they turn into humble 
bees, when they eat their way out, 
and become mostly workers. No 
male bees are hatched until late in 
the summer. The cocoons are after¬ 
ward used for laying up honey, on 
which the colony feeds during the 
summer. Foxes, rats, and other 
small animals know well how to find 
these honey cells, and often rob the 
humble bees of their store. Humble 
bees will sting, but their sting is not 
so bad as that of the honey bee or 
the wasp. 

The humble bee belongs to the 
order hymenoptera , or membrane¬ 
winged INSECTS. 

The name of this bee is either 
humble bee or bumble bee ; bumble 
is old English, and means to make a 
humming noise. 

HUMMING BIRD, a bird so called 
from the sound made by its wings. 
Humming birds are found only in 
America, though the sun birds of 
the Old World are much like them 


in many things. There are more 
than three hundred kinds, most of 
which live only in Central and South 
America, and in the West India 
Islands. Humming birds are the 
smallest and most beautiful of all 
birds. Some of them, when stripped 
of their feathers, are not much 
larger than humble bees. The differ¬ 
ent kinds have many different forms 
of plumage, differing in crests, neck 
feathers, leg feathers, wings, and 
tails, and their colors show all the 
tints of the rainbow. The muscles 
of their wings are stronger for the 
size of their bodies than those of any 
other bird ; this makes them able to 
fly with great swiftness and to hover 
over a flower while they sip the 
honey or catch the insects in it. 
Their bills are slender and mostly 
very long, being straight in some 
kinds and curved in others, accord¬ 
ing to the kind of flowers they live 
on. Their tongue also is very long 
and can be darted out to a consider¬ 
able length. 

Humming birds do not sing, but 
have only a kind of shrill cry. They 
build very pretty nests of mosses and 
lichens, lining them with cotton or 
any other soft thing which they can 
find, and lay two white eggs about 
as large as peas. The humming 
birds of the north go south in winter, 
and return in May. They are easily 
tamed and will come to the window 
to be fed, but cannot be kept in 
cages, for they cannot bear to be 
shut up, and usually die in two or 
three months. 

Humming birds are admired by 
everybody for their beauty, and many 
pretty names are given to them. 
The Indians in South America call 
them “sunbeams,” the Brazilians 
* ‘ flower-suckers, ’ ’ and white people 
in other parts of South America, 
“ flower - peckers. ” In the West 
Indies they are often called “mur- 
murers,” from the sound of their 
wings. In some places they are 
much hunted for their beautiful feath¬ 
ers, from which ladies make collars 






HYDROGEN 


3i8 


HYENA 


and many kinds of ornaments ; their 
wings and tails, and sometimes 
whole birds, stuffed, are used to 
decorate ladies’ hats. The ancient 
Mexicans and Peruvians used to trim 
mantles with their feathers, and also 
weave them into beautiful pictures, 
and Christian Indians in South Amer¬ 
ica ornament the images of their 
saints with them. 

The humming bird belongs to the 
order inscssores, or perching BIRDS. 

HYDROGEN, one of the principal 
elements. In its usual form hy¬ 
drogen is a gas without color or 
taste, and when pure without smell ; 
but it may be changed into a liquid 
by a great amount of cold and of 
pressure. It is the lightest of all 
known substances, being nearly fif¬ 
teen times lighter than common air 
and more than 150,000 times lighter 
than quicksilver. BALLOONS there¬ 
fore are often filled with it. 

Water is made up of hydrogen and 
OXYGEN, there being in it two parts 
of hydrogen to one part of oxygen ; 
but as oxygen is sixteen times as 
heavy as hydrogen, there are eight 
times as much of it by weight in 
water as there is of hydrogen ; or, 
in other words, there are eight 
pounds of oxygen and one of hydro¬ 
gen in every nine pounds of water. 
Hydrogen is never found alone by 
itself, and when we want some we 
have to get it out of water. 

Whenever hydrogen is burned, 
whether pure or mixed with other 
things, water is always made. As 
the flame is very hot, the water is 
always in the form of a gas, so that 
we cannot see it, but it can be easily 
turned to a liquid by cooling it. If 
a cold bottle be held over a flame of 
burning hydrogen, the inside of it 
will become covered with dampness, 
and water will soon run down in 
drops. Though burning hydrogen 
gives but little light, its flame is one 
of the hottest known, and it is used 
with oxygen in the oxy-hydrogen 
BLOWPIPE to melt very hard things. 
It is also used with oxygen and lime 


to make the calcium or Drummond 
light, which is one of the brightest 
known. 

Some people think that everything 
in the world is made of hydrogen, 
and that all the elements are only 
hydrogen in different forms, but this 
is not probable. 

The word hydrogen means water- 
maker, and it is made from the 
Greek words udor, water, and 
gennein , to make. 

HYENA. This animal is found 
wild only in Africa and in Southern 
Asia. It is generally a little taller 
than a large dog, but some are 
much larger. Its body is covered 
with coarse shaggy hair, which 
grows like a mane on the back and 
neck. Its hinder parts are lower 
than the fore parts, which gives it 
an awkward, shambling gait, and it 
has a large head and ears. It lives 
chiefly in caves, from which it comes 
out at night to look for food. 

Hyenas are among quadrupeds 
what vultures are among birds, for 
they live mostly on decayed animals, 
and are very useful in clearing cities 
and villages of rotting things which 
might make sickness. They often 
follow armies to eat the dead bodies 
of the slain, and in the East they 
sometimes dig up corpses from 
graveyards. When very hungry 
they will attack cattle, and they have 
been known to carry off children, 
but they are afraid of grown-up men. 

The striped hyena, whose coat is 
yellowish gray striped with black, is 
found mostly in Northern Africa, 
Arabia, Syria, and Persia ; and the 
spotted hyena, which has spots in¬ 
stead of stripes, is found mostly in 
South Africa. The spotted kind is 
easily tamed, and some Africans 
keep it for a dog. 

The hyena is a MAMMAL of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating an¬ 
imals. By some writers it is put in 
the dog family, but it is usually put 
in a family by itself. 

The word hyena is from the Latin 
hycena , hyena. 





ICE. Water begins to crystallize, 
or freeze, when the thermometer 
is 32 degrees above zero, and this is 
therefore called the freezing point ; 
but on quiet nights, when the water 
is very still, it will sometimes cool 
below the freezing point without 
turning into ice. At such times 
what is called anchor ice, or ground 
ice, may be seen on things at the 
bottom of ponds and streams. This 
is oftenest seen on clear cold nights 
when the surface of the water is at 
the freezing point, and the air is 
colder. The ice then forms on rocks 
and other things on the bottom be¬ 
fore it forms on the surface of the 
water. But if water thus cooled 
below the freezing point be stirred, 
or anything be thrown into it so as 
to move it, it will at once freeze and 
its heat will rise to the freezing point. 
Different reasons have been given 
for this, but we cannot explain them 
here. 

In turning into ice, water expands 
or swells—that is, any given quantity 
of water makes a larger amount of 
ice ; and the ice is therefore lighter 
than the water. This is the reason 
why it floats in water. If it were 
heavier than water, it would sink to 
the bottom, and all the water be¬ 
come so chilled that in cold coun¬ 
tries it would never thaw. When 
water swells by freezing it causes 
such a pressure that it splits open 
rocks, ploughs up the banks of 
streams, and crumbles the soil. In 
very cold weather ice shrinks, or be¬ 
comes smaller, so that it sometimes 
pulls apart in weak places on ponds 


and lakes with a loud noise like the 
report of a gun. 

In some parts of the earth ice is 
found all the year round. This is es¬ 
pecially the case in the regions around 
the north and south poles, and on 
the tops of very high mountains, 
even in the hottest countries. In all 
countries where great tracts are for¬ 
ever covered with snow, the valleys 
are usually filled with vast bodies of 
ice which move slowly down toward 
the bases of the mountains until they 
reach a point warm eough to melt 
the ice. These great ice rivers, 
which are called glaciers (French, 
glacier , from glace , ice), move so 
slowly that the eye cannot see them 
move, but they gain a little every day, 
being pushed forward by the weight 
of the masses of snow and ice be¬ 
hind them. In Switzerland glaciers 
sometimes move down into peopled 
valleys, and destroy everything, leav¬ 
ing the ground covered with loose 
stones. The largest glaciers are in 
the polar regions. In northern 
Greenland they move down into the 
sea, where the water breaks off great 
masses, which float away and be¬ 
come icebergs (German, ezsberg, 
from ezs, ice, and berg , mountain). 
The great floating masses of salt¬ 
water ice, caused by the breaking up 
of the ice-fields in the polar seas, are 
sometimes also called icebergs, but 
they are really ice islands. Real 
icebergs are of fresh-water ice, 
formed by the breaking off of the 
ends of glaciers by the sea. Some 
of them are higher than the highest 
church steeple, and several miles 


319 



ICE 


320 


ICE 


long. The largest icebergs have 
been seen in the ocean around the 
south pole. 

Ice is now used so much all over 
the world that it has become an im¬ 
portant article of commerce. A 
great deal is shipped to foreign 
countries every year from the United 
States, and many men are employed 
in cutting and storing it up in ice 
houses. These houses are built on 
the banks of the rivers or ponds from 
which the ice is to be taken. They 
are great wooden buildings without 
windows, and are made with double 
walls with saw-dust packed between 
them, because saw-dust is a poor 
conductor of heat, and therefore 
keeps the outside heat from getting 
to the ice. When the ice is thick 
enough to be cut, the top of it is 
scraped off, if it is soft or if there is 
snow on it, by a scraper drawn by 
horses. The surface is then marked 
off into large squares by a plough, 
drawn by a horse, and afterward into 
smaller divisions by a kind of harrow, 
which cuts grooves or cracks about 
three inches deep. Some of the 
blocks are then sawn out by hand, 
and after an opening has been thus 
made the other blocks may be easily 
split off with an ice spade in the 
grooves. They are then floated 
along in canals cut through the ice to 
the bank of the pond or river and 
hoisted by means of an endless chain 
worked by a steam engine into the 
houses, where they are packed in 
straw, which, like saw-dust, keeps 
the outside heat from it. Ice is sent 
from the United States to the East 
Indies, Cuba, and other parts of the 
West Indies, South America, and 
other countries. 

A good deal of ice is made by art 
instead of in the natural way. There 
are two ways of doing this, one in 
the way in which icecream is frozen, 
and the other by means of machines 
in which a liquid is turned into a 
vapor. Both of these ways are told 
about in the article Heat. 

In some cold countries like Green¬ 


land, people build houses out of ice, 
and live in them. They are obliged 
to do this because there are no trees 
there to build comfortable wooden 
houses of, and tents covered with 
the skins of animals would not be 
warm enough in winter. The ice 
houses of the Esquimaux are made 
by piling up square blocks of ice or 
frozen snow and cementing them 
together by pouring water over 
them. They are thus frozen into 
one solid mass. These houses are 
round, like the half of a hollow ball ; 
a hole is left in the top for the smoke 
to come out, and a small square of 
thin clear ice is set into the wall for 
a window. On the side where the 
wind blows the least a long passage¬ 
way is made, so low that one has 
to crawl through it on hands and 
knees, and this is the only door. 
There are two good things about 
these ice houses : they are so low 
and so strong that the high winds of 
that bleak region cannot blow them 
over, and no one can live in one 
more than one season, for they melt 
away in the summer. The Esqui¬ 
mau is very dirty and would never 
clean a house, no matter how long 
he lived in it; but the melting of 
the ice forces him to move, and he 
lives in a sealskin tent until the com¬ 
ing of cold weather again obliges 
him to build a new house. 

The Esquimaux are not the only 
people who build ice houses, for a 
splendid ice palace was once built 
by an Empress of Russia. This 
was in the winter of 1739-40, when 
the cold was very great in Europe. 
The palace was begun in December, 
1739, an d lasted until the end of 
March, 1740. They began to build 
it on the ice of the River Neva, 
which flows through the city of St. 
Petersburg, but the weight was so 
great that it began to settle, and the 
workmen were ordered to build it on 
the banks of the river, near the great 
Winter Palace. The ice was cut 
out in great blocks, squared with 
tools just like building-stone, hoisted 






INCENSE 


321 


INDIA RUBBER 


into place, and cemented with water 
which froze at once. The palace 
was only one story high, and had 
only three rooms in it, a great hall 
and two large chambers, one on each 
side. All the rooms had windows 
with window - panes of thin ice. 
The outside of the palace was deco¬ 
rated with ornaments and with stat¬ 
ues, all carved in ice. An ice balus¬ 
trade was built around the front and 
two ends, forming a kind of court¬ 
yard. Outside of this, at the two 
corners, were large ice pyramids, 
and between these, in front of the 
palace, were placed cannons carved 
out of ice, and great ice dolphins 
mounted on pedestals. There was 
also an immense ice elephant, with a 
man upon his back and other men 
standing beside him. This elephant 
had his trunk raised up in the air and 
spouted water out of it in the day¬ 
time and burning naphtha at night, 
twenty-four feet high. The dolphins 
too were so made that burning naph¬ 
tha would spout out of their mouths, 
and the ice cannon could be loaded 
with real powder and fired. The 
palace used to be lighted up at night 
with thousands of candles and 
torches, and it is said to have looked 
very splendid ; but in these days it 
can only be regarded as a great waste 
of time and money. 

The word ice is from the Anglo- 
Saxon is , which is from an old word 
meaning to shine. 

INCENSE, a mixture of gums, 
spices, and other things, burned for 
its perfume. It is usually a pow¬ 
der made up of benzoin, storax, and 
other resins, cascarilla bark, etc. 
Incense is burned generally in Ro¬ 
man Catholic churches in a censer 
(short for incenser) or thurible (from 
Latin thus, thurts, frankincense), a 
silver vessel hung by chains so that 
it may be swung in the hand. The 
powder is so placed that it will drop 
little by little on a hot plate in the bot¬ 
tom of the censer, and as it burns the 
smoke escapes through little holes 
and fills the church with sweet 


odors. Sometimes incense is made 
up into little cones called pastils 
(French pastille, from Latin pastil- 
lus, a little loaf), to burn in rooms 
for perfume. 

Some think that incense was first 
used in churches to make the air 
sweet, because in old times the com¬ 
mon people were not cleanly in their 
habits ; and others, that it came into 
use when the plague was raging, to 
keep people from catching the dis¬ 
ease in the churches. But it was 
used by the ancient Egyptians in 
their worship, and afterward by the 
Jews, and it is probable that the early 
Christians took the custom of burn¬ 
ing it from them. 

The word incense is from the 
Latin incensutn, which is from 
incendere, to burn. 

INDIA RUBBER, the hardened 
juice of several kinds of trees, grow¬ 
ing in Mexico, Central and South 
America, and the East Indies. It is 
also called caoutchouc, and some¬ 
times gum elastic. The India rub¬ 
ber of commerce comes mostly from 
the East Indies and from South 
America, especially from Brazil. 
The East Indian rubber is the juice 
of a kind of fig tree, which grows to 
a very great size. The South Amer¬ 
ican is the juice of the syringe tree, 
which is also very large, being some¬ 
times twice as high as a four-story 
house ; it was so called by the 
Portuguese because the Indians used 
little bottles made of the gum to 
hold water, with which they 
syringed out their mouths after eat¬ 
ing. The trees are tapped by cut¬ 
ting holes through the bark, and the 
juice is caught in a cup and emptied 
into a large jar. Moulds made of 
clay, shaped like shoes, bottles, 
balls, etc., are then dipped into the 
juice and dried until the covering is 
thick enough, when the mould is 
broken into pieces and poured out. 
In India the rubber is dried in the 
sun, and is of a grayish-white color, 
but in South America it is dried over 
a fire, and the smoke makes it black. 






INDIA RUBBER 


322 


INDIA RUBBER 


The juice itself is sometimes sent to 
foreign countries in tin and glass 
cans. As it comes from the tree it 
is of a pale yellow, and about as 
thick as cream ; but it hardens and 
becomes nearly pure white when 
spread out thin and dried. 

Until about the beginning of this 
century India rubber was used only 
for rubbing out pencil marks, but 
now its uses are more numerous 
than those of almost any other 
article. All kinds of elastic and 
water-proof goods are made from it, 
and it is woven with silk, cotton, or 
woollen threads into a great number 
of fabrics. The India rubber threads 
are cut in machines. A sheet of 
rubber is put round a roller, which 
turns slowly. A little circular knife, 
which goes round very fast, and 
which is kept wet with water so that 
the rubber will not stick to it, cuts a 
thin thread off the edge of the sheet, 
and as the roller holding the sheet 
moves slowly sidewise the sheet is 
thus cut into one long thread. This 
thread is then stretched and wound 
on to another roller. India rubber 
loses its elasticity, or springiness, 
when kept stretched for a few days, 
and may then be woven with other 
threads into cloth, elastic bands, sus¬ 
penders, etc. If it is then passed over 
a hot roller, it will become elastic 
again. 

In making water-proof clothing 
the rubber is dissolved, or melted 
into a liquid, and spread over cloth ; 
the cloth is then pressed between 
rollers until the rubber is spread 
evenly over the surface, and is then 
dried. This makes single water¬ 
proof cloth ; when two pieces of 
cloth are thus covered and pressed 
together between rollers they stick 
fast to each other and make double 
water-proof cloth. The rubber used 
is dissolved or melted usually in gas- 
tar oil, but sometimes in turpentine, 
but the turpentine is apt to smell 
badly. Rubber will dissolve also in 
ether, chloroform, naphtha, and 
PETROLEUM, but not in ALCOHOL. 


The discovery of the art of “ vul¬ 
canizing” rubber, so called from 
Vulcan, the god of fire, because it is 
done by great heat, has largely added 
to its uses, and made it much more 
valuable. It is done by mixing it 
with sulphur and then heating the 
mixture very hot, when the two 
unite into one substance which is 
unlike common rubber, in many 
things. It cannot be dissolved by 
the things which will dissolve pure 
rubber, is scarcely eaten by acids, 
and while more elastic or springy 
than pure rubber, it keeps its elas¬ 
ticity both in very cold and in very- 
hot weather Tubes, fire hose, and 
gas pipes, elastic rings or bands, 
door and window springs, mats, 
boots and shoes, machinery belts, 
and very many other useful things 
are made out of this kind of vulcan¬ 
ized rubber. 

What is called hard rubber or 
“ ebonite” is made out of India rub¬ 
ber and sulphur heated much hotter 
than soft vulcanized rubber. This 
is made into canes, combs, the backs 
of brushes, buttons, surgical instru¬ 
ments, picture frames, knife handles, 
and a great variety of other things. 
Another compound made with rub¬ 
ber, sulphur, and coal tar, heated 
together, makes a substance which 
can be cast into moulds or rolled out 
into sheets, and which, when cold, 
is so hard and black that it looks 
like JET. This may be cut and pol¬ 
ished, and is much used for making 
articles of jewelry, such as bracelets, 
breast pins, sleeve buttons, shirt 
studs, and watch guards, and many 
other ornamental and useful things. 

India rubber has been known for 
more than a hundred years, but the 
many uses to which it is now applied 
have all been found out during the 
present century. The discovery of 
the way of vulcanizing rubber was 
made by Charles Goodyear, an 
American, in the year 1839, but it 
did not come into use until about 
1844. 

India rubber gets its name from 





INDIGO 


323 


INSECTS 


India, because it was first brought 
from that country. The word caout¬ 
chouc is from cahuchu , the South 
American Indian name of India rub¬ 
ber. 

INDICO, a blue coloring matter 
made from several kinds of plants, 
some of which grow in India and 
Ceylon, some in China and Japan, 
some in Egypt, and some in the 
West Indies and Central and South 
America. The plants are raised 
from seed every year. They are cut 
when green and soaked in vats of 
water 15 to 20 hours, when they 
work and send off much gas, color¬ 
ing the water light green. The 
green liquor is then drawn off into 
another vat, a little lime water is put 
in, and it is beaten with poles, which 
causes the green matter to turn blue 
and settle to the bottom. The clear 
water is then drawn off, and the blue 
matter at the bottom is allowed to 
run into a third vat, where it is per¬ 
mitted to settle again. The clear top 
water is again drawn off, and the 
blue matter at the bottom is put into 
coarse bags to drain. After it has 
drained enough the paste is put into 
little boxes and dried in the sun, 
when it is fit for market. All the 
best blue dyes are made from indi¬ 
go, and it is also the basis of the 
black dyes used for woollen cloths. 

The word indigo is made from 
India, where the substance was first 
used. 

INK. The ink used by the an¬ 
cients was more like a paint than 
like our thin ink, so that the letters 
were raised a little above the PARCH¬ 
MENT or papyrus on which they 
wrote. It was made usually of 
LAMP-BLACK mixed with gum, and 
was like the solid Chinese or Indian 
ink of the present day, which is 
made in the same way. When 
wanted for use, it was thinned with 
water. The ancients also made 
black ink out of the juice of the 
cuttle-fish. Most of their books 
were written with black ink, but the 
title-pages and the heads of chapters 


were written with red ink, and were 
therefore called rubrics, from the 
Latin rubrica , red. They also had 
inks of other colors, and gold and 
silver inks. Emperors and kings 
used a purple ink made from the 
same mollusk which gave the 
beautiful Tyrian purple, and also a 
red ink made of vermilion. 

Writing Ink is now commonly 
made of nut-galls, sulphate of 
iron (commonly called green vit¬ 
riol), gum, and water ; but differ¬ 
ent makers have different ways of 
making it. If intended for copying 
ink, that is, an ink from which a 
copy of the writing may be taken by 
pressing a sheet of damp paper on it, 
a little more gum is putin, and some¬ 
times a little sugar. Blue ink is 
usually made of Prussian blue, oxalic 
acid, and water. The color in red 
ink is got from Brazil wood or 
from cochineal. Indelible or 
marking ink, used for marking 
clothes, is usually made of nitrate of 
silver, mixed with gum Arabic, India 
ink, and water, but there are other 
kinds. 

Printing Ink differs from writing 
ink in being thicker and more like a 
paint. It is usually made of lamp¬ 
black mixed with boiled LINSEED oil 
and turpentine. Rosin oil is used in 
cheap inks, and soap is also some¬ 
times put in. Printing ink has to be 
made with the greatest care. 

The word ink is from the old Eng¬ 
lish enke , which is probably from 
the Greek enkauston , the vermilion 
used by the emperor in signing his 
name. 

INSECTS. The body of every 
insect is made up of a certain num¬ 
ber of rings, which are divided into 
three parts : one ring forms the 
head, three the thorax or chest, and 
nine to eleven the abdomen.. All 
insects have three pairs of legs, all 
of which grow on the chest, the 
front pair on the first ring, the mid¬ 
dle pair on the middle ring, and the 
hind pair on the last ring. The 
feet of some have claws, some have 





INSECTS 


324 


INSECTS 


a kifid of suction pad by which they 
can walk with the back downward, 
some are fitted for digging, and 
others for swimming. They have 
usually either two or four wings, also 
on the chest, but never any other 
number, though some have no wings 
at all, and in some kinds the males 
have wings and the females are 
wingless. In the two-winged in¬ 
sects, such as flies and mosquitoes, 
two .little threads, each with a small 
knob or ball at the end, take the 
place of the second pair of wings. 
These are called balancers, but their 
use is not well known. In some 
other insects, as the beetles, the for¬ 
ward pair of wings are thick and 
strong and are used only as coverings 
for the others. These are named 
elytra , which means sheaths or 
wing-covers. When the insect is 
at rest the elytra are turned over the 
back, and the true or flying wings 
are folded under them. 

All insects have on their heads two 
very delicate organs of touch, or 
feelers, called antemice , which some 
suppose to be also for hearing and 
smelling. The antennae of different 
insects are of many 
forms, some of which 
are shown in the 
picture. There are 
also smaller feelers 
called palpi. As in¬ 
sects feed on different 
kinds of food, some 
living on animal and 
some on vegetable sub- 

Antennaj. stances, while others 
A, antenna of a only suck juices, there 
kind of beetle ; j s muc h difference in 

C, of a drag- the sha P e of their 
on-fly. mouths, some being 
formed for gnawing, 
cutting, and tearing, some only 
for sucking, and some for both 
gnawing and sucking. Gnawing in¬ 
sects, such as beetles and cock¬ 
roaches, are called mandibulate in¬ 
sects, because they have a set of up¬ 
per jaws called mandibles y with 
which they cut their food. Below 


them is another pair of jaws called 
maxillce. Both of these jaws shut 
together sidewise. The mandibles 
are usually stronger than the maxillae, 
are often toothed and hooked, some¬ 
times have sharp cutting edges like 
scissors, and sometimes are made 
for bruising and grinding. There 
are also in this kind of insect an up • 


a B CD 



Mandibles. 

A, mandible of a kind of beetle; B, of a 

grasshopper ; C, of a kind of dragon¬ 
fly ; D, of the paper-making wasp. 

per and a lower lip, which move up 
and down, and are as hard as the 
jaws. 

Insects which live by sucking 
juices are called haustellate insects. 
They take in their food through a 
kind of proboscis, or tube, which 
runs out from the lower lip and 
which differs much in different in¬ 
sects in length and in shape. It is 
generally kept rolled up under the 
head, but can be uncoiled and run 
down into flowers to reach their 
juices. Mosquitoes and other in¬ 
sects which suck the blood of ani¬ 
mals have a proboscis fitted with 
delicate lancet-like bristles to pierce 
the skin. 

Most insects have two large com¬ 
pound eyes, or eyes made up of a 
great number of small ones, on the 
side of the head, and three small 
simple or single eyes between them ; 
but some have only compound eyes, 
and some only single eyes. The 
compound eyes are sometimes made 
up of as many as 25,000 small ones. 
Each eye of the common fly is com¬ 
posed of 4000 simple eyes. 

Eggs of Insects. Most insects are 
hatched from eggs laid by the 
parent, and are therefore said to be 
oviparous (Latin oviparus, from 
ovum, egg, and par ere, to bring 
forth). Most of them take no care 










INSECTS 


325 


INSECTS 


of their eggs, but leave them to be 
hatched out by warmth, but bees, 
ants, and some others carefully rear 
their young. The number of eggs 
laid varies much : the flea lays about 
12, many flies and beetles lay about 
50, silkworms from 500 to 2000, 
while the queen bee will lay 40,000 
to 50,000 in a season, and the white 
ant as many millions. 

The Larva. Almost every insect 
passes through three different stages 
or changes of being. In its first 
stage, or when it comes out of the 
egg, it is called a larva (Latin larva , 
plural larvce , a mask), because this 
is not its true form, but only the 
mask of the form to come. The 
larvae of butterflies and moths are 
called caterpillars, those of beetles 
grubs, and those of flies maggots. 
The larvae of other kinds of insects 
have no special names. Larvae eat 
a great deal and grow very fast. 
The maggots of flesh flies increase 
their weight two hundred times in a 
day. Most larvae change their skins 
four or five times. 

The Pupa. A few days before the 
larva is ready to enter upon its sec¬ 
ond stage it becomes restless, stops 
eating, and usually spins a silken 
cocoon, or makes one of earth, chips, 
or leaves. When its house, is fin¬ 
ished it shuts itself up within it and 
goes into a state of apparent sleep. 
During this period of rest, which is 
called the pupa state (Latin pupa , 
plural pupce , a doll or puppet), a 
great change goes on, and the insect 
makes ready to enter upon its third 
s tage, growing gradually into the 
form of the perfect insect. Most 
pupae eat nothing, but lie motionless 
till the time comes for the third 
stage, but some, as dragon flies, 
which do not undergo a perfect 
change, are active and eat a great 
deal. The pupa of the butterfly or of 
the moth is usually called a chrysalis 
(Greek chrusallis , from chrusos, 
gold), on account of the golden color 
of its cocoon, and the pupa state is 
called the chrysallid state. > 


The Imago. The time in which 
the insect stays in the pupa state 
differs according to the changes of 
the seasons. Some pupae lie in the 
cocoon all winter. When the right 
time comes the cocoon is broken and 
the full-formed insect, which a little 
while before was a crawling worm, 
appears as a bright and beautiful 
creature with wings, ready to sport 
in the sunshine and among the flow¬ 
ers. The insect in this third stage 
is called an imago (Latin imago , an 
image), because it is the image of 
its perfect condition. It grows but 
little after this, does not eat much, 
and is short-lived. The female 
hastens to lay her eggs either in, on, 
or near what is to be the food of the 
larva, and then dies. 

Butterflies, moths, bees, beetles, 
flies, and some other insects under¬ 
go a perfect change from the worm¬ 
like form to the winged insect ; but 
some others, such as grasshoppers, 
crickets, dragon-flies, etc., although 
they pass through the three stages, 
never have the worm form, and do 
not shut themselves up in cocoons. 
The full grown grasshopper differs 
from the young one only in having 
wings and in its size. 

Insects inhabit the air, the earth, 
and the water. Some kinds are 
found in all parts of the world, and 
some only in particular places. 
The largest kinds live in very hot 
countries. Some, such as the bee, 
the silkworm, and the cochineal bug, 
are very useful to man ; but many 
kinds, such as the locust, the grass¬ 
hopper, the potato bug, and many 
flies, are very harmful, destroying 
herbage and crops. Insects have 
the senses of touch, sight, hearing, 
smell, and taste, and their instincts 
are so wonderful that they sometimes 
seem almost to be able to reason. 
Their muscles are very strong and 
active, and they can leap higher, fly 
swifter and longer, swim faster, dig 
more in a given time, and carry and 
drag heavier weights, in proportion 
to their size, than any other animals. 










INSECTS 


326 


INSECTS 


Insects are commonly divided into 
seven orders according to the shape 
of their wings. 

I. Hymenoptera, or membrane¬ 
winged insects, which have four 
naked wings, with few veins on 
them, the two in front being much 
larger than the hinder ones. They 
include the bees, wasps, saw flies, 
ants, and others. 

The word hymenoptera is from 
the Greek hwnen , membrane, and 
ptero?i , wing. 

II. Lepidoptera, or scale-winged 
insects, which have four large wings, 
with regular veins on them, covered 
with small scales. They include the 
butterflies and moths. 

The word lepidoptera is from the 
Greek lepis , scale, and pteron , wing. 

III. Diptera, or two-winged in¬ 
sects, which have but one pair of 
naked wings. Among them are the 
flies, mosquitoes, daddy - long-legs, 
and fleas. Although the fleas have 
no wings, they are looked upon as 
imperfect flies, and so are put into 
this class. 

The word diptera is from the 
Greek dis, twice, and pteron , wing. 

IV. Coleoptera, or sheath-winged 
insects, which have a pair of hinder 
wings for flying and a pair of horny 
ones in front for covering the real 
wings when the insect is * at rest. 
They include the beetles, of which 
there are many different kinds. 

The word coleoptera is from the 
Greek koleos, sheath, and pteron, 
wing. 

V. Hemiptera, or half-winged in¬ 
sects, which are so called because 
their fore-wings or wing-covers are 
half thick and half thin ; but some 
of this order, as the locusts, have 
both sets of wings so thin that one 
can see through them, and others, 
as the bed-bugs, have no wings at 
all. They are all alike, however, 
in having their mouths fitted with 
a horny beak made for suction, 
which has in it several stiff bristles 
for piercing. The chief families of 
the hemiptera are the plant lice, 


body lice, bed-bugs, chinch and 
squash bugs, water-bugs, and cica- 
dae, one kind of which is commonly 
called the “ seventeen year locust.” 

The word hemiptera is from the 
Greek hemi, half, and pteron, 
wing. 

VI. Orthoptera, or straight-wing¬ 
ed insects, so called because their 
hinder wings, when at rest, are fold¬ 
ed like a fan and laid straight along 
the sides of the back. Their front 
wings, which are somewhat thicker, 
are joined on the top when closed so 
as to make a kind of roof over the 
others. The mouths of this order 
are made for biting, and the hind 
legs are large and fitted for leaping. 
Among the orthoptera are included 
the crickets, locusts, grasshoppers, 
cockroaches, and earwigs. 

The word orthoptera is from the 
Greek orthos , straight, and pteron , 
wing. 

VII. Neuroptera, or nerve-winged 
insects, which have four large thin 
wings veined with a network of little 
nerves. The hinder wings are usu¬ 
ally of the same size with the fore 
ones, but in some kinds they are 
smaller and in others are wanting. 
Their bodies are long and slender, 
and their mouths are made for bit¬ 
ing. The principal neuroptera are 
the dragon-flies, commonly called 
devil’s darning-needles, may flies, 
day flies, and white ants or termites. 

The word neuroptera is from the 
Greek word neuron , nerve, and 
pteron , wing. 

The word insect is from the Latin 
insec turn, from insec are, to cut in, 
the bodies of insects being cut in so 
as to be nearly divided. 

Elytra is the plural of the Latin 
elytrum, which is from the Greek 
elytron , a sheath. 

Antennae is the plural of the Latin 
a 7 itenna, a sail-yard. 

Palpi is from the Latin palpare, 
to feel softly. Maxillae is the plural 
of the Latin maxilla, little jaws. 

Mandibulate is from the Latin 
mandibula, from mandere, to chew. 







IRON 


327 


IRON 


Haustellate is from the Latin haus- 
tellum , a sucker. 

IRON. The most abundant of the 
METALS, and one of the principal 
elements. It is not found as a 
metal, but as an earthy ore, usually 
united either with oxygen (iron 
oxide) or with carbon (iron car¬ 
bonate). Sometimes masses of 
nearly pure iron have fallen from the 
air on the earth in the form of 
meteors. Some of these weighed 
many thousand pounds, and have 
been used by the people of the coun¬ 
tries in which they fell in making 
knives, spears, and other things. 
There is some iron in almost all 
rocks, earths, and waters, and it is 
found in the ashes of plants and in 
the blood of animals. The reddish 
color of many rocks and earths is 
made mostly by iron. When pure, 
iron is almost as white as silver, 
softer than wrought iron, and takes 
a very high polish ; the iron of com¬ 
merce is never entirely pure, but has 
always a little carbon, silicon, 
sulphur, and PHOSPHORUS in it. 

Iron Ores. There are several kinds 
of ores from which iron is made. 
Hematite ore is so called on account 
of its color, which is reddish brown, 
the word being made from the Greek 
aima , blood. A good deal of the 
pig iron made in the United States 
and in England is from this ore. It 
is found in great abundance in Chili 
and other parts of South America, 
in Algeria, and in England, Nor¬ 
way, Sweden, and other parts of 
Europe. In the United States there 
are large beds of it near Lake Su¬ 
perior, in Missouri, and in Wyoming 
Territoiy. In Missouri, two moun¬ 
tains, called Iron Mountain and Pilot 
Knob, are largely made up of this 
ore. 

Brown hematite, which includes 
bog, marsh, or lake ore, and ochre, 
gets its name from its general 
brownish color, though it is some¬ 
times of a yellowish or reddish tint. 
It is found in many forms, as a hard 
stony ore and as a loose earth, but 


all kinds are only changes from other 
ores, made by the action of damp¬ 
ness, air, and other things. It is 
often found in marshy places, where 
it has been carried by streams from 
the hills around. This kind of ore is 
found in almost all parts of the 
world, and a great deal of iron is 
made from it, especially iron used 
for castings. The iron ores of Salis¬ 
bury, Connecticut, and of Columbia 
and Dutchess Counties, New York, 
are of this kind, and much is found 
also in the Southern and Western 
States. 

Magnetic iron ore, or magnetite, 
is usually found in large masses, and 
is easily known by its black color 
and by its being drawn toward a 
magnet. It does not get its name 
from this, but from the ancient 
country called Magnesia, in North¬ 
ern Greece. Most of the iron ore in 
Sweden and Norway is of this kind, 
and there are whole mountains of it 
among the Ural Mountains. In this 
country it is found in the Adirondack 
Mountains, in northern New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Cali¬ 
fornia, and other States. Magnetic 
iron ore is one of the richest in pure 
metal, and from it is made the finest 
iron and the best steel. 

Siderite is an iron ore made up 
mostly of iron carbonate, lime, and 
magnesia. From it is made a kind 
of cast iron. It is found chiefly in 
Germany, England, and at Roxbury, 
Connecticut. 

Cast Iron, or pig iron, as it is 
commonly called, because it is 
moulded in little bars or pigs as it 
runs from the furnace, is made by 
smelting or melting iron ore in a 
great furnace nearly as high as a 
four-story house (50 or 60 feet). 
The picture shows such a furnace 
cut down through the middle so that 
the inside can be seen. It is closed 
at the bottom, the air needed for the 
fire being blown through pipes call¬ 
ed tuyeres (pronounced tweers), one 
of which is seen on the left near 
the bottom, while the hole through 








IRON 


328 


IRON 


which another one enters is shown 
at the back part near it. The fur¬ 
nace is called a blast furnace from 
the blasts of air thus forced into it. 

The furnace is filled from the top 
with layers of coal, ore, and lime¬ 
stone, which are thrown in one after 
the other until the inside is filled up. 
The limestone, commonly called 
the “ flux,” is put in to take out the 
earthy impurities, with which it 
mixes. When the furnace is once 
fired the fire is never allowed to go 



Blast Furnace. 


out until it is necessary to build a 
new furnace. Sometimes one will 
keep on burning for years, new lay¬ 
ers of fuel, ore, and limestone being 
thrown in as fast as the iron melts 
down. The blast of air at the bot¬ 
tom makes a very great heat; the 
ore melts and runs down into the 
bottom part of the furnace, and the 
flux unites with the earthy matters, 
forming a kind of glassy matter 
called “slag.” This, being lighter 
than the iron, floats on top of it and 


finally flows off over a place called 
the dam, leaving the melted iron by 
itself. The iron is allowed to run off 
now and then through a hole, called 
the tapping-hole, at the bottom of 
the furnace,which is closed with sand 
when not in use. The metal flows 
out in a bright, golden stream into 
sand moulds on the floor, where it 
cools and becomes pig or cast iron. 

The funnel, or cone-shaped hood 
with which the top of the furnace is 
closed, is put on to collect the gases, 
which would pass off into the air if 
the top were left open. These gases 
have a great deal of heat in them, 
and are carried off through the pipe 
at the top and burned in another 
kind of furnace, where they are used 
to heat the air which is forced into 
the furnace through the tuyeres. 

Wrought Iron. Cast iron is only 
fit for making things which are cast 
in moulds, such as gas and water 
pipes, lamp-posts, pillars and fronts 
for buildings, railings, and heavy 
stoves. It is not pure iron, but has 
carbon in it, and cannot be ham¬ 
mered, as it is brittle and will easily 
break. To make it into wrought 
iron — that is, softer iron which 
can be hammered or rolled into 
plates—the cast iron is melted in 
another kind of furnace, and stirred 
up so that the air can get to it. 
This, which is called puddling it, 
burns out the carbon, silicon, sul¬ 
phur, phosphorus, and other impure 
things in the iron. 

The furnace in which this is done 
is shown in the second picture. The 
iron to be heated is not put right on 
the coal; the fire is built on the grate 

G, and the iron is put on the hearth 

H. The flame passes over the 
hearth, and the heat is reverberated 
or driven down on the iron from the 
low rounded roof.. For this reason 
such a furnace is called a reverbera¬ 
tory furnace. When the cast iron on 
the hearth is so nearly melted that it 
makes a kind of paste, it is gathered 
in lumps on the end of an iron bar 
and carried to a power hammer, 






















IRON 


IRON 


329 


under which it is hammered while 
red hot. This forces out the liquid 
slag and makes the iron into a solid 
mass. Sometimes, instead of ham¬ 
mering, the hot iron is squeezed in 
strong iron jaws called squeezers. 

Wrought iron thus made is softer 
than pig iron, and may be easily 
hammered into bars, rolled into 
plates, and drawn out into wire. 
From it are made the iron plates for 
steam boilers and ships, anchors, 
chain cables, wire, ploughs, wheel- 
tires, horse-shoes, shovels, and 
spades, nails and spikes, and the 
iron part of most tools. Wrought 
iron can be welded—that is, pieces 
of it can be united into one by ham¬ 


mering them together when red 
hot. 

Malleable Iron is not wrought iron, 
but a kind of cast iron which is made 
very tough by baking for six to ten 
days in a furnace. Things made of 
it are cast first and baked afterward. 
This takes out much of the carbon, 
and makes the iron less brittle and 
therefore less apt to break. If the 
cast iron used was good, the things 
thus made are tough enough to be 
hammered, on which account they 
are called malleable, from Latin 
malleus , a hammer. A much quick¬ 
er way of making malleable iron has 
lately been found out. 

Steel is iron which has more 



Reverberatory Furnace. 


carbon in it than wrought iron and 
less than cast iron ; so its hardness 
is between that of wrought iron and 
cast iron. 

Iron does not change in fresh air, 
but in damp air it soon unites with 
the oxygen of the air and rusts. 
When iron nails, screws, and bolts 
used in building ships, houses, 
bridges, etc., rust, they give up 
some of the oxygen to the carbon of 
the wood which they touch, and the 
wood is thus slowly eaten or burned 
away. Iron may be kept from rust¬ 
ing by covering it with a thin coat¬ 
ing of ZINC, making it into what is 
wrongly called “galvanized iron.” 


Another way is to heat it in very hot 
steam. This makes a black coating 
on the iron, through which the oxy¬ 
gen of the air cannot get, and the 
metal therefore cannot rust. 

Iron is often given as a medicine. 
The human body has considerable 
iron in it, especially in the blood, 
which is mostly colored by it. The 
food which we eat usually has iron 
enough in it to keep up the needed 
supply, but sometimes the blood 
does not have enough of the red 
corpuscles in it, and then it is neces¬ 
sary to give iron as a tonic, that is, 
to give strength. 

England makes more iron than 

















ISINGLASS 


330 


IVY 


any other country in the world. The 
next largest amount is made in the 
United States, and after that come 
in order Germany, France, and 
Sweden. 

The word iron is from the Anglo- 
Saxon iren or isen, iron.. 

ISINCLASS, the purest kind of 
gelatine. The best is made from 
the air-bladders or sounds of the 
sturgeon caught in the Black and 
Caspian seas, but isinglass is made 
also from the bladders of cod and 
other fish. It is colorless, has no 
smell, and melts easily in hot water, 
making a clear beautiful jelly. It is 
much used for making blanc-mange, 
jellies, ices, and other kinds of des¬ 
serts. A poor kind of isinglass is 
used for fining or clarifying beer. 

Isinglass Glue, sometimes called 
diamond CEMENT, is made of isin¬ 
glass and gum mastic melted in 
weak spirits of wine or in gin. It 
makes a hard, milk-white jelly ; it 
should be warmed before using. 
Isinglass mixed with gum is used for 
giving a gloss to silk. 

Court Plaster is made by spread¬ 
ing a thick coating of isinglass on 
silk. It is called isinglass plaster 
when made with muslin or linen in¬ 
stead of silk. 

The thin pieces of mica used in 
stoves are commonly called isin¬ 
glass. 

The word isinglass is for icing- 
glass, and is made up from ICE and 
GLASS. 

IVORY, the hard white substance 
which forms the tusks of the ele¬ 
phant. This is the pure ivory, but the 
tusks of the hippopotamus, walrus, 
narwhal, and other animals are some¬ 
times used in the arts for the same 
purposes as ivory, and are often call¬ 
ed ivory. The tusks of the African 
elephant yield the best ivory, and 
many thousands of them are used 
every year in the manufacture of 
knife handles, billiard balls, chess¬ 
men, dice, fans, combs, paper 
knives, napkin-rings, organ and 
pianoforte keys, etc. It is thought 


that twenty thousand elephants are 
killed yearly in Asia and Africa for 
their tusks. Much ivory is also 
brought from Siberia, taken from 
dead mammoths or fossil elephants 
found frozen up under snow and ice 
in the far north, where they are sup¬ 
posed to have lain for thousands of 
years. This ivory is very hard and 
brittle, and whiter than other ivory. 

Ivory can be bleached and also 
dyed of various colors. It can also 
be made flexible, so that it will bend 
as easily as leather. Great taste and 
skill are often shown in working 
ivory, and some of the carved toys 
and ornaments made of it are very 
beautiful. The Chinese and Japan¬ 
ese are very skilful in carving it. 

Vegetable Ivory is the nut of a 
kind of palm tree which grows in 
South America. The nut, which is 
about as large as a hen’s egg, con¬ 
tains a sweet liquid which gradually 
thickens until it becomes hard and 
white. It looks much like ivory and 
may be used instead of it for many 
things, such as buttons, umbrella 
handles, and cane heads. 

The word ivory is in French 
zvozre, and is from the Latin ebur, 
ivory. 

IVY, a climbing evergreen plant, 
common in southern and western 
Europe, and especially in Great 
Britain ; usually called English ivy. 
The ivy climbs to the tops of high 
trees and buildings, and covers rocks 
and ruins with its beautiful leaves, 
which are dark green, smooth, and 
shiny. It is also trained in gardens 
to form screens and evergreen 
walls. In this country it does not 
succeed very well as far north as 
New York, though fine specimens are 
sometimes seen, but it grows luxuri¬ 
antly in Virginia. In the Northern 
States it is much cultivated as a 
house plant, being trained to run 
over windows or along the cornices 
of rooms. What is called German 
ivy is not an ivy, but a kind of vine 
which came first from the Cape of 
Good Hope. It is a very pretty house 





IVY 


33 i 


IVY 


plant, but does not do so well out of 
doors, as it is killed by the first 
frost. The Virginia creeper, a 
beautiful climbing vine of the grape 
family, is sometimes called American 
ivy. Poison ivy, sometimes called 


also poison oak and mercury vine, 
which climbs over rocks and fences 
and even up tall trees, is properly a 
SUMACH and not an ivy. 

The word ivy is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ifig , ivy. 





JACKAL. This animal is found 
in Asia, Africa, and in European 
Turkey, but nowhere else in the 
world. It looks like the fox, but is 
taller. Its fur is grayish yellow 
above, and white below, and its tail 
is tipped with black. Jackals usually 
sleep during the day, and go out at 
night in troops, sometimes more than 
a hundred together, to hunt for food. 
They keep up a constant howling, 
making a sad, harsh sound, which 
is horrible to hear at night. They 
are afraid of men, but they will often 
steal into houses and carry off every¬ 
thing which they can eat, even boots 
and shoes, harness, and other things 
made of leather. But they live 
mostly on decayed things, and, like 
hyenas, often dig up dead bodies. In 
some countries graves have to be 
covered with large stones and prickly 
bushes to keep them from being dug 
open. 

The ancients said that the jackal 
always went before the lion to find 
prey for it, and that the lion gave it 
in return the remains of its meal, 
but there is no truth in the story. 

The jackal can be tamed, and 
taught to know its master. It acts 
much like the dog, and some think 
that the dog is descended from the 
jackal. 

The jackal is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the same family with 
the dog, the fox, and the wolf. 

The word jackal is from the Arabic 
jakal , jackal. 

JAGUAR. In South America, 
where this animal is chiefly found, 


it is sometimes called panther and 
sometimes South American tiger. It 
is but little smaller than the tiger, and 
is so strong that it can drag off an 
ox or a horse with ease. Its fur is 
usually brownish yellow, beautifully 
marked with circles of black with 
dark spots in them. The jaguar 
lives in thick forests near large 
rivers, and feeds chiefly on live ani¬ 
mals and fish. It is a good climber, 
and often lies in wait on the limb of 
a tree and springs on the back of its 
victim as it passes beneath. It is 
also a good swimmer, and is said to 
stand in the water and throw out fish 
with its paw as they swim along. 

Jaguars have been killed as far 
north as Louisiana, but they are now 
scarce except in the wildest parts 
of South America. Their skins are 
very handsome, and are much prized 
for robes. 

The jaguar is a MAMMAL of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the cat family, which 
includes also the LION, TIGER, 
LEOPARD, PANTHER, COUGUAR, 
LYNX, and common CAT. 

The word jaguar comes from 
jagoara , the Brazilian name of this 
animal. 

JASPER, a kind of precious stone, 
used for rings, seals, and other or¬ 
naments, and also for the decoration 
of costly buildings. It is a sort of 
quartz, but has clay mixed with the 
silica (see Silicon) of which it is 
chiefly made up. There are many 
colors of jasper, and some are stri¬ 
ped, spotted, or clouded very beauti¬ 
fully. It is found in many parts of 


332 



JELLY FISH 


333 


JET 


the world, but the finest kinds come 
from Spain, Hungary, Egypt, and 
Siberia. 

The word jasper is from the Latin 
and Greek iaspis , jasper. 

JELLY FISH. In walking along 
the sea beach after the tide has gone 
out, we often see on the sands 
round, jelly-like masses of a green¬ 
ish-yellow color. These dirty-look- 
ing things, from which we turn away 
in disgust, are, when in the water, 
among the most beautiful of ocean 
animals. Though they have no 
solid matter in their bodies, which 
are made up mostly of water, they 
have in them a kind of soft net¬ 
work, which holds their parts to¬ 
gether. They have too a mouth 


and a stomach, for they eat like other 
animals, and solid food, such as 
CRUSTACEANS, MOLLUSKS, and 
even small fishes, has been found 
in them. 

One of the commonest kinds of 
jelly fish looks much like a floating 
umbrella, or rather like a mushroom 
with the stalk split into four parts 
and fringed on all the edges, as 
shown in the picture in B, which is 
the way it sits in the water. In A 
is shown the under part of the ani¬ 
mal, with the mouth in the middle 
and the four feelers stretching out 
from it. These feelers are also 
graspers, with which they catch 
their prey. Their fringed edges 
have the power of stinging, and it 



Jelly Fish. 

A, Bottom View; B, Side View. 


is supposed that this helps them in 
catching animals for food, like the 
poison used by some insects. When 
touched by the hand or any other 
part of the human body, they cause 
a sharp pain like that made by the 
stinging leaves of the nettle ; for 
this reason the jelly fish is some¬ 
times called the sea nettle. 

When floating the jelly fish looks 
like a mass of whitish jelly, marked 
with many soft, delicate colors, like 
those seen in the OPAL. Much of 
the phosphorescence or light seen 
in the sea is made by the jelly fish. 
It moves along in the water by 
waving the fringed edges of its um¬ 
brella-like top, and thus makes long 


voyages on the surface of the sea. 
If an enemy touches it or it strikes 
against anything, it folds itself up 
and sinks down into the depths. In 
some places jelly fish cover the 
whole top of the sea in such num¬ 
bers as to furnish much food for 
whales and many crustaceans. 
They are found in all seas, both in 
hot and in cold countries, but in 
warm places they are much larger 
than those seen on our coasts, being 
sometimes three or four feet wide. 

The jelly fish belongs to the class 
of radiate animals. 

JET, a black mineral, easily cut 
and carved, which takes a beauti¬ 
ful polish. It is a kind of bitumi- 






JEW’S HARP 


334 


JUTE 


nous coal, but harder and smoother 
than that used for burning. Much 
of it is found near Whitby, in Eng¬ 
land, and it is made there into neck¬ 
laces, earrings, brooches, bracelets, 
and other trinkets, mantel orna¬ 
ments, buttons, etc. Good jet is 
also found in Spain and France, and 
largely made into crosses and rosa¬ 
ries. False jet is made of black 
glass, hard black wax, and other 
things. 

The word jet is from the Latin 
and Greek gagates, and the stone 
was named from the river Gagas, in 
Lycia, Asia Minor, near which much 
jet was found. 

JEW’S HARP, a simple musical 
instrument, made of metal. When 
played it is held between the teeth, 
and a little spring or tongue is made 
to vibrate or tremble by being struck 
with the finger while the performer 
draws in and breathes out air. The 
tones are made by the way the air 
strikes on the tongue while it is 
vibrating. The Jew’s harp has been 
known for two or three hundred 
years, and several musicians have 
given concerts with it with great 
success. 

It is not known how the Jew’s 
harp got its name. Some think it 
is so called because it was used by 
the Jews, but it is more probable 
that Jew is only a changed form of 
the French jeu, toy, and that the 
name means toy-harp. 

JOGGLE, a joint made between 
two bodies by cuting jogs or 
notches in their sides, and fitting in 



Joggle-Joints. 


pieces. The joint is also called joggle- 
joint and joggled-joint,and the pieces 
put in are called joggles. In the pic¬ 
ture two kinds of joggles, used in 


stonework, are shown. The pieces 
set in, which are of stone or metal, 
keep the blocks of stone from slid¬ 
ing. 

JUJUBE, the fruit of a small tree 
which grows in Syria. It is of the 
shape and size of an olive, but is 
red or yellow when ripe. It is dried 
as a sweetmeat and sent to other 
countries ; but the jujube paste sold 
in candy stores is made out of gum 
arabic and sugar, and has no real 
jujube in it. 

The word jujube is changed from 
the Arabic zifzuf. 

JUNIPER, an evergreen shrub of 
the same family with the cypress. 
The common juniper of Europe sel¬ 
dom grows as high as a man, ex¬ 
cepting when very old. It bears dark 
purple berries about as large as a 
pea, which have a brownish pulp 
with three seeds. They have a 
sweetish and bitterish taste, and a 
flavor like turpentine. The oil of 
juniper is distilled (see Alcohol) 
from them, and they are put into 
GIN, giving that liquor its flavor. 

The word juniper is from the 
Latin juniper us, the juniper tree. 

JUTE, a material something like 
hemp, made from the inner bark of 
two East Indian plants called by this 
name. Its fibres are strong, coarse, 
dark in color, and sometimes twelve 
feet long. It is largely used for 
making coarse bagging and sacking 
called gunny cloth. Gunny bags, 
in which pepper, ginger, sugar, 
rice, gums, etc., are shipped from 
India, are made of it. Gunny cloth 
is brought to the United States in 
bales, and largely used for covering 
cotton bales. Jute is also used with 
false hair for making chignons, and 
it is largely mixed with silk, it hav¬ 
ing such a gloss that it can scarcely 
be told from silk when woven with 
it. Attempts have been made to 
manufacture paper out of jute, but 
as it is hard to bleach it white only 
a coarse kind of brown paper is 
made of it. 









K 


KALEIDOSCOPE, an instrument 
in which beautiful forms or images 
may be seen. It is made up of a 
tube, having at one end an eyeglass, 
and at the other end two glasses 
with little pieces of broken colored 
glass put loosely between them, so 
that they can move about. Inside the 
tube, and running lengthwise with 
it, are narrow strips of looking glass, 
or of glass blackened on the back, put 
together at the edges with the faces 
inward. Three strips of glass are 
commonly used, but sometimes four 
or five, and even more, are put into 
kaleidoscopes. In looking into the 
tube the bits of colored glass between 
the end glasses are reflected in the 
looking glasses and made to appear 
in regular figures of most beautiful 
forms, which change whenever the 
instrument is shaken. The kaleido¬ 
scope is a very pretty toy, and is 
also much used by pattern drawers 
and others, who get from it a great 
many different designs. The first 
kaleidoscope was made in 1817 by 
Sir David Brewster. 

The word kaleidoscope is made 
up of the three Greek words kalos, 
beautiful, ezdos, image, and skofiein , 
to see. 

KANGAROO. This animal is 
found only in Australia, New 
Guinea or Papua, and the neighbor 
ing islands. The great kangaroo is 
nearly as tall as a man, and has very 
long hind legs by means of which it 
makes long leaps, sometimes as 
much as fifteen feet at a bound. Its 
fore legs, which are very short, are 
not used for walking, but only for 


digging, taking hold of things, and 
bringing food to the mouth. The 
tail is long, thick, and strong, and is 
used to balance the animal in its 
leaps and also in sitting down. The 
head of the kangaroo is something 
like that of a deer. There are also 
smaller kinds of kangaroos, some of 
which are not larger than a rabbit. 
Some kangaroos live in the open 
plains and some on the mountains 
in Australia, but most of them are 
found in forests. They eat only 
vegetable food. They are very timid 
and will run away from man, but are 
easily tamed when caught. The 
young are carried around in a kind 
of pouch or pocket under the body 
of the mother until they are old 
enough to take care of themselves. 
They may be seen sometimes poking 
their heads out and nibbling the 
grass as their mother moves along. 
Even after they have left the pouch 
they often return to it on the ap¬ 
proach of danger. 

The fur of the kangaroo is much 
prized, and its flesh is excellent for 
food. These animals are therefore 
much hunted, a kind of dog—half 
mastiff and half greyhound—being 
raised especially to chase them. 
They fight the dogs with their tails, 
striking them heavy blows, and 
sometimes tear them open with the 
strong nails of their hind legs. 

The kangaroo is a mammal of 
the order viarsupialia , or pouch¬ 
bearing animals, to which belongs 
also the opossum. 

KINGFISHER. The belted king¬ 
fisher is the only one of this family 




KITE 


336 


KITE 


of birds found in North America. 
It has a large head with a crest, and 
a long straight bill. Its color is blue 
above and white on the breast, with 
a blue band across the breast, 
whence it gets its name of belted. 
It lives near fresh water rivers and 
lakes, and may often be seen skim¬ 
ming along the surface of the water 
looking for fish, on which it feeds. 
When it sees a fish, it stops sud¬ 
denly, dashes down headlong into the 
water, seizes it with its bill, carries it 
to a stump or tree, and swallows it 
head foremost, unless it be too large, 
when it first breaks it to pieces. It 
makes its nest in deep holes which 
it digs in the river’s bank, and lays 
usually six white eggs. 

The European kingfisher, which 
is much like the belted kingfisher in 
its habits, is the halcyon of the an¬ 
cients, who believed that the sea 
stayed calm for a few days while the 
bird was building its nest. These 
days, which were the seven days be¬ 
fore and the seven days after the 
winter solstice (21st December),were 
therefore called halcyon days. 

The kingfisher belongs to the or¬ 
der of insessores , or perching birds. 

The word kingfisher is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon cyng , king, and 
fisc ere, fisher. 

KITE, the common name of a bird 
of prey, which flies very high, soar¬ 
ing on the wing as if it were floating 
on the air, and from which the paper 
kite gets its name. Among the kites 
found in America is the swallow¬ 
tailed kite, a large bird, with long 
pointed wings and forked tail. It is 
a shy bird and keeps on the wing 
almost all day, sometimes flying so 
high that it can scarcely be seen, and 
coming down at night to roost on 
tall trees. When in the air it lives 
mostly on insects, but it eats also 
moles, rats, mice, small birds, and 
poultry. It builds its nest in the top 
of high trees, and lays five or six 
greenish-white eggs, with brown 
blotches on the larger end. 

The kite belongs to the order rap- 


tores , or birds of prey, and to the 
FALCON family, which includes al¬ 
so the eagles, falcons, hawks, 
and BUZZARDS. 

The Saxons called this bird cyta, 
and from this our name has come. 

KITE. Kites get their name 
from the kind of hawk called a kite, 



which may often be seen in the air 
almost as still as a paper kite, glid¬ 
ing along without moving its wings. 
Paper kites may be made of many 
different shapes, but the most com¬ 
mon kinds are shown in the pictures : 
Fig. 1, made by crossing two sticks, 
is called a cross kite ; Fig. 2, made 



Fig. 2.—House Kite, showing the way 
of cutting the paper. 

with three sticks, is a house kite ; 
and Fig. 3, made with one straight 
stick and one bowed stick, a bow 
kite. The sticks must be first tied 
tightly together, and a string is then 
put round the outside, in notches 
cut for it, to paste the paper on to. 
















KITE 


337 


KITE 


A tail of paper or cloth is usually 
fastened to the bottom of the kite, to 
give it steadiness when the wind 
blows strong. 

The Chinese and Japanese are very 
skilful in making kites, and in their 
countries both old and young may 
be seen flying them in good weather. 
The frames of their kites are made 
of light bamboo sticks, and the cov¬ 
ers are of thin but very tough paper. 
They are of a great many different 
shapes, not only like our kites, but 
often like animals, ships, carts, cas¬ 
tles, trees, and flowers. Sometimes 
castles, palaces, or pagodas may be 
seen in the air, with all their win¬ 
dows lighted by small lamps, so as 



to look like real houses at night. 
These lamps often set fire to these 
air castles, and burn them up, which 
makes a very pretty sight. Some 
kites are like great bouquets of flow¬ 
ers, or like trees with leaves, flow¬ 
ers, and fruit on them, the fruit con¬ 
taining fireworks which go off in the 
air ; and some are hung with lan¬ 
terns or made like fire-wheels, the 
spokes of which have fire-flies fast¬ 
ened to them. In Japan one may 
often see in the air a whole menag¬ 
erie at once, such as horses, cows, 
dogs, monkeys, owls, hawks, bats, 
crows, fishes, and snakes, as well as 
dragons, babies which cry, boys with 
their arms and legs spread out, hunt¬ 


ers with bows and arrows, and sol¬ 
diers with battle axes and spears. 
Many of these kites have a thin strip 
of bamboo or whalebone stretched 
tightly across the top, which hums, 
buzzes, or sings in the air like a 
hurdy-gurdy or a swarm of bees. 
Live birds do not like the kite birds 
which hum, and keep far away from 
them. Japanese boys send mes¬ 
sengers up to their kites just as 
American boys do, but they also do 
some other things not known in this 
country. They dip about ten feet of 
the string next to the kite into glue 
and then into bits of broken glass ; 
when the string is dry it is covered 
with many little blades of glass as 
sharp as a razor. When two boys 
are flying kites they often try to 
cross each other’s string, and the 
more skilful one saws off the cord of 
the other one with his glass string. 
Many Japanese kites have no tails, 
but some have two, one at each cor¬ 
ner, made of rice straw. 

Kites are sometimes used by en¬ 
gineers to carry lines across deep 
chasms. This can be done only 
when the wind is right, so that the 
kite will fly over the place where the 
line is wanted ; it is then made to 
fall down so that those on ihe other 
side of the chasm can get hold of 
the string. Larger and larger cords 
can be fastened on and drawn over 
until one of the size wanted has been 
carried across. In this way the first 
wire of the Niagara suspension 
bridge was got across the Niagara 
River. Kites have also been used in 
a similar way to get a rope to a ves¬ 
sel wrecked near shore, and many 
lives have been thus saved. 

But the most important use to 
which a kite was ever put was when 
Dr. Franklin employed one during a 
thunder storm (June 15, 1752) to 
draw down lightning from the 
clouds, thus proving that it is the 
same as that made by the electrical 
machine. He covered his kite with 
a silk handkerchief instead of with 
paper, because silk is a better non- 









KNIFE 


338 


KNIFE 


conductor than paper. The kite had 
fastened to it a pointed iron wire, 
and to this he tied the string by 
which he flew it. He thought that 
some of the lightning would be 
drawn from the clouds by the wire, 
and would go from it down the hemp 
string instead of to the silk kite. If 
he had held the string in his hands, 
the electricity would have passed 
from it to his body and thence to the 
earth ; but he prevented this by tying 
a silk ribbon to the ei^d of the string 
and holding on to that instead of the 
string. The electricity could not 
pass through the non-conducting 
silk, and so it stayed in the string. 
He now fastened an iron key to the 
end of the string. As iron is a bet¬ 
ter conductor than hemp, the key 
became filled with it, and Franklin 
found, when he put his knuckle to 
it, that sparks came from it, just as 
they do from the conductor of an 
electrical machine. He also found, 
when he held a Leyden jar to the 
key, that the ELECTRICITY would go 
into the jar and charge it, and that he 
could use this electricity in the same 
way as that got from an electrical 
machine. Before this time it was 
supposed that lightning and electric¬ 
ity were the same, but nobody actu¬ 
ally knew them to be so until Franklin 
brought down the lightning to earth 
with his kite. By using his kite in 
this way he also found out how to 
make lightning rods for the pro¬ 
tection of buildings. 

KNIFE. In the most ancient 
times, shells, flints, and sharp-edged 



Ancient Stone Knife. 


stones were used for knives. Some¬ 
times stone knives were made with 
a kind of handle and ground sharp 
on the edge, like the one shown 
in the first picture. In time men 
found out the use of copper and tin, 


and then they made BRONZE knives. 
Almost all nations in ancient times 
used knives and other cutting instru¬ 
ments made of bronze. Pictures of 
bronze knives used by the Greeks 
and Romans, are shown in the cuts 
below. But knives of iron and steel 


Ancient Bronze Knives. 

came into use very early, and after a 
while took the place of bronze, as 
they were found to be stronger and 
more lasting. 

The best knives are now made of 
steel, although a good many cheap 
ones are made of iron. Table knives 
are usually partly of steel and partly 
of iron : the blade is steel, but the 
shoulder, or raised part near the 
handle, and the tang, or part which 
fits into the handle, are iron. Table- 
knife blades are commonly made 
from a bar of shear-STEEL, which is 
heated white hot and then hammer¬ 
ed out into shape on an anvil by two 
workmen, one with a heavy and one 
with a light hammer. This is called 
forging the blade. As each blade 
is made it is cut off, and when the 
bar becomes too short to hold in the 
hand, it is held in a pair of tongs 
until it is all used up. Pen-knife and 
razor blades are usually made of 
cast-steel. Knife blades are ham¬ 
mered out on a flat anvil, but razor 
blades, which are hollowed out on 
the sides, are made on a round-faced 
anvil. After the knife blade is made 
it is fastened on to an iron bar by 
heating them both red hot and ham¬ 
mering them together until they be¬ 
come one piece. This is called weld¬ 
ing. The shoulder and tang are then 
forged from the iron and cut off like 
the blade. 











KNIFE 


339 


KNOTS 


Pen-knife blades are forged from 
the end of a rod of cast-steel, with a 
light hammer on a small anvil. 
After the blade is done, enough 
more of the steel is cut off to make 
the joint, or part by which it is fitted 
to the handle. The blade is then 
held in a pair of tongs and heated 
again, when the joint is forged. 
The nick, or nail-hole as it is called, 
in the side of the blade is stamped 
with a chisel while it is hot. 

After forging, knife blades are 
stamped with the maker’s name, 
and then tempered by heating them 
red hot and cooling them quickly by 
dipping them into water. They are 
afterward ground and polished and 
fitted with handles.. The handles of 
the best table knives are made usu¬ 
ally of ivory, though sometimes 
mother-of-pearl and tortoise shell 
are used, and sometimes gold and 
silver. Cheap knives are handled 
with celluloid, a false ivory made 
out of GUN-COTTON and camphor, 
and with stag-horn, cow-horn, and 
different kinds of wood. 

Pen-knives and other pocket knives 
pass through a great many hands 
before they are finished. Besides the 



blades, there are the springs, the 
scales or thin iron plates on the 
sides, the parts of the handle, and 
the rivets, the making of each of 
which is a separate trade. When 
all the parts are ready, they go to 
the finisher, who puts the knife to¬ 
gether. 

There are a great many kinds of 
knives used in different 'trades, but 
most of them are made in the same 
way. Drawing knives, much used 
by farmers for making shingles, and 
by coach and wagon makers, are 
shaped like the one in the picture. 


The bowie knife is a kind of knife 
once much worn by men in the 
South and South-western States, 
where they were used both as hunt¬ 
ing knives and in street fights. It 
is quite long usually, and has a wide, 
sharp blade, shaped like the one in 



Bowie Knife. 


the picture. The first knife of this 
kind was made by Colonel James 
Bowie of Texas, and his name was 
therefore given to it. 

Our word knife comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon word cnif, knife. 

KNOTS. It is very useful to know 
how to tie knots. Sailors, who have 
much to do with ropes, use a great 



Fig. i.—Overhand Knot. 


many different kinds, some of which 
are hard to learn. In this article 
can be given only a few of the sim¬ 
pler ones, which can easily be un¬ 
derstood from the pictures. In all 
these the rope is shown before the 
knot is drawn tight. When a rope 
is folded together or bent round, 
the loop part is called the “ bight.” 



Fig. 2.—Half Hitch. 


In tying a knot in a single rope the 
part held in the left hand is called 
the ‘ ‘ standing part. 

The Overhand Knot, one of the 
simplest kinds, is made by passing 
the end of the rope over the standing 
part and then up through the bight, 
as shown in the picture, Fig. i. 














KNOTS 


340 


KNOTS 


The Half Hitch is made by passing 
the end of the rope under the stand¬ 
ing part and then down through the 



Fig. 3.—Figure of Eight. 


bight. The picture, Fig. 2, shows 
two half-hitches, one made above 
the other. 

The Figure of Eight is made by 
making a loop at the end of the 



Fig. 4.—Bowline Knot. 


rope, and then passing the end under 
and around the standing part and up 
through the loop, as in Fig. 3. 

The Bowline Knot is made by lay¬ 
ing the end of the rope across the 



Fig. 5.—Common Bend. 


standing part so as to form a loop, 
then passing the end up through the 
loop, then under the rope below the 


loop, and lastly down through the 
loop again, as shown in Fig. 4. 

The Common Bend is a knot tied 
with two ropes. It is formed by 
passing the end of one rope up 
through the bight of another rope, 
then under and around both parts, 



and lastly down through the bight 
again, as in Fig. 5. 

The Sailor’s Knot is made bypass¬ 
ing the end of one rope down through 
the bight of another one, then pass¬ 
ing it over one side and under the 
other side of the second rope, and 
finally down through the bight, as 
in Fig. 6. 



Fig. 7.—Fisherman's Knot. 


The Fisherman’s Knot is some¬ 
thing like the sailor’s knot, but dif¬ 
fers in the way the ends are put, as 
can be seen in the picture, Fig. 7. 

The word knot is from the Latin 
nodus, knot. 






I 


LAC, a resinous substance found 
on several kinds of trees in the 
East Indies. It is caused by the 
bites or stings of an insect some¬ 
thing like the COCHINEAL insect. 
These insects live on the sap of the 
trees, and soon become glued to the 
branches by the juices which ooze 
out. In time they die, leaving many 
eggs to be hatched into like insects, 
which continue the work of their 
parents until the twigs of the tree 
are covered with a thick coating of 
the resin. The sap which they eat 
gives a purple-red tinge to the whole 
body, which does not decay when 
the insects die, but remains with 
the gum. When the twigs are well 
covered, people cut them off and 
put them into hot water, which 
melts off the gum. It is then puri¬ 
fied by straining through bags and 
dried on strips of wood. This is 
called “shell-lac.” “Seed-lac” is 
small bits of lac shaken from the 
trees by various causes, and “ stick- 
lac” is the twigs as they are gath¬ 
ered, but broken up into little pieces. 

When the twigs containing the 
lac are soaked in hot water, the col¬ 
oring matter in the bodies of the 
dead insects is washed out. After 
the melted lac is taken out, the col¬ 
ored water is strained and evapo¬ 
rated, and the purple sediment or 
dregs is cut up into small cakes and 
sold as “lac-dye.” Great quanti¬ 
ties of this are used in dyeing scar¬ 
let cloths, for which it is found to 
be better than cochineal, because the 
color is not so much changed by 
perspiration. For this reason, the 


cloths of which the coats worn by 
British soldiers are made are dyed 
with it. 

The lac resins are used for mak¬ 
ing VARNISHES, polishes, LAC¬ 
QUERS, and sealing wax. French 
polish, much used on furniture, is 
made of shell-lac and alcohol. Lac 
is brought mostly from India, Bur- 
mah, and Siam. 

The word lac is from the Persian 

lak. 

LACE. The thread of lace may be 
of silk, wool, linen, cotton, silver, or 
gold. The finest kinds of lace are 
made upon a pillow or cushion. 
The pattern is drawn on a piece of 
stiff PARCHMENT pricked full of 
holes ; the parchment is laid on the 
pillow and pins are stuck into the 
holes, thus fastening the pattern to 
it. Bobbins or spools filled with 
fine thread are arranged around the 
cushion so that the threads can be 
twisted round the pins. The bob¬ 
bins are taken up one after the other 
and passed across the pillow from 
right to left, and then back again, 
twisting the thread around the pins 
according to the pattern, so as to 
form the kind of net-work always 
seen in pillow lace. Among the 
principal pillow laces are those 
called Valenciennes, Honiton, Mech¬ 
lin, Antwerp, Brussels, Chantilly, 
Lisle, Spanish, and Limerick. 

Another kind of laces are those 
called guipure, which include the 
various point laces, such as Point 
d’Alengon, Brussels Point, Venetian 
Point, Rose Point, Maltese Point, 
and Portuguese Point. Most of 


34i 



LACQUER 


342 


LAMP 


these are ancient laces, and are to be 
seen only in museums, but the two 
first named are still made. They 
are not made on a pillow, but are 
all needle work, each part of the 
pattern being worked separately on 
a piece of fine linen called the foun¬ 
dation, and afterward joined together 
by threads. 

Great quantities of lace are now 
made by machinery, on the lace- 
frame. Such laces, which are 
usually called bobbin-net, are often 
of great beauty, and are so cheap 
that they may be worn by every¬ 
body. In making plain bobbin-net, 
warp threads are used and woof 
threads (see Cloth) are twisted 
round them, so as to form a mesh. 
The patterns are sometimes woven 
in by the machine, and sometimes 
hand-made ornaments are put on to 
a machine-made net. 

The word lace is from the Latin 
laqueus, a noose or net. 

LACQUER, a varnish made of 
shell-lac and other things, dissolved 
in alcohol, and used mostly for coat¬ 
ing metals, chiefly polished brass, 
to which it gives a golden tint. 
The name is also given to the var¬ 
nish made by the Chinese and Japa¬ 
nese from the juice of the varnish 
tree, a kind of SUMACH which grows 
in their countries, and which is used 
to make the beautiful lacquered 
ware so much sought after. This 
varnish is sometimes mixed with 
colors, such as vermilion for making 
red lacquer, and is sometimes mixed 
with gold dust. Lacquered ware is 
often inlaid with mother-of-pearl 
and ornamented with designs in 
gold. Some of it is very costly and 
brings high prices even in Japan 
and China. 

The word lacquer is made from 
LAC. 

LADY-BIRD or LADY-BUC. This 
little insect is usually red, orange, or 
yellow, with black spots, or black, 
with white, yellow, or red spots. It 
lays little yellow eggs in clusters on 
the leaves and twigs of plants, 


among the plant lice, on which both 
the larvae or grubs and the full- 
grown insects feed. After living 
about two weeks as grubs they fast¬ 
en themselves to a leaf, spin a co¬ 
coon, and become pupae (see In¬ 
sects), and in a fortnight more come 
out as lady-birds. 

In old times the lady-bird was be¬ 
lieved to live in the sun, and the 
German children still have a rhyme 
telling it to fly away up to heaven 
and bring back the sunshine ; and 
they believe that if they were to kill 
one of these insects the sun would 
not shine the next day. The Eng¬ 
lish rhyme— 

“ Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, 

Your house is on fire, your children will bum,” 


I 




2 



i, Perfect Insect; 2, Larva; 3, Pupae. 

probably refers to the same belief, 
the lady-bird’s house being the sun. 
In Westphalia, Germany, little girls 
set a lady-bird on the end of their 
forefinger and ask it in rhyme when 
they will be married : in one year ? 
two years ? three years ? etc. ; and 
they grow very impatient if the in¬ 
sect lets them count too high before 
it flies away. 

The lady-bird belongs to the order 
coleoptera, or sheath-winged in¬ 
sects. The lady-bird is so-called 
because in old times it was dedicated 
to Our Lady, or the Virgin Mary. 

LAMP. In old times lamps were 
simple flat vessels, round or oval, 
with a handle at one end, a kind 
of spout with a hole for the wick 
at the other end, and a larger hole 






LAMP 


343 


LAMP 


in the top to pour oil in. This kind 
of lamp, shown in the picture, 
was used by the Greeks, Romans, 
and other ancient peoples. The 
wicks were sometimes made of tow 
and sometimes of rushes. This 



same kind of lamp is still used 
among the French people of Can¬ 
ada. Its light is dim and smoky, be¬ 
cause its wick is so close that the 
oxygen of the air cannot get at the 
carbon until much of it has passed 
off as soot (see Fire). A little 
more than a hundred years ago 
lamps were made in Germany with 
flat braided wicks, which were 
moved up and down by turning a 
little screw, much like those in kero¬ 
sene lamps. As such a wick has a 
broader surface, more air can reach 



Argand Burner. 

A, Top View; B, Side View. 

it and the carbon can thus get more 
oxygen. Soon after, a Frenchman 
named Argand found out how to fit 
lamps with round wicks, so that the 


air could get to both the inside and 
the outside of the wick. This made 
a much brighter light than was be¬ 
fore known, because the carbon of 
the oil could thus get still more oxy¬ 
gen than before ; but he made it 
better by adding a chimney to the 
lamp, which causes a draught of air 
to pass up the middle of the wick, 
and also keeps the flame steady. 
In A, which shows the burner cut 
across, the outer white circle is the 
glass chimney, the inner dark circle 
the wick, and the round dark spot 
in the middle the hollow inside up 
which the air comes. The air also 
comes up in the wide white space 
between the chimney and the wick. 
In B is given a side view of the same, 
the arrows showing, the way the air 
comes up and brings oxygen to the 
flame. 

A great many different kinds of 
lamps have been made, some of 
which are very simple, while others 
have so much machinery about them 
that they are very apt to get out of 
order. In old times vegetable oils, 
such as olive oil and linseed oil, were 
mostly burned in lamps ; afterward 
lard oil and whale and other fish 
oils were used ; and when whale oil 
became scarce, camphene and burn¬ 
ing fluid, made out of alcohol and 
turpentine, came into use ; but when 
petroleum was found out, kerosene 
oil took the place of all other things 
for burning in lamps. Lamps are 
not much used now in cities, as 
GAS gives a much better light, and 
is much cleaner and less trouble¬ 
some ; but lamp light is better for 
the eyes, because it does not flicker 
so much. 

The'Safety Lamp or miner’s lamp 
is of great use in mining. Dread¬ 
ful accidents often happen in coal 
mines from the explosion or blow¬ 
ing up of a kind of gas called 
fire-damp. When this gas gets 
mixed with common air it will blow 
up as easily as gunpowder and kill 
everybody near it. As coal mines 
are usually underground and dark, 

















LAMP-BLACK 


344 


LATH 


the miners have to work by the light 
of lamps and candles, and before 
safety-lamps were made many acci¬ 
dents took place from the gas tak¬ 
ing fire from the miners’ lights. The 
safety-lamp is only a common lamp 
set into a kind of lantern of wire 
gauze. Air will pass through wire 
gauze, but flame cannot. If you 
hold a piece of iron wire gauze over 
a gas burner and turn on the gas, the 
gas will pass through so that you 
may light it on the upper side. 
Then move the gauze several inches 
above the burner, and you will see 
that the flame will not pass through 
the gauze. This is because the 
gauze takes away the heat so quickly 
that the gas will no longer burn. 
In the same way fire-damp can go 
through the gauze of the safety- 
lamp and burn on the inside, but 
the flame cannot get to the outside ; 
and so the miner who works by the 
light of such a lamp is safe from fire¬ 
damp explosions. 

The word lamp is from the Greek 
lamias, lamp, from lampein , to 
shine. 

LAMP-BLACK, a kind of soot 
made by burning resin, coal tar, 
pitch, and other such substances in 
close iron vessels. These give off a 
dense smoke, which passes off into 
a chamber covered with a coarse 
woollen cloth. The lamp-black 
forms a thick coating on this cloth, 
from which it is shaken off and put 
up in barrels for sale. 

Printer’s ink, blacking, and 
black paint are made from lamp¬ 
black. Other kinds of black paint 
are also made from soot: Spanish 
black from the soot of burnt cork ; 
bone and ivory black from burnt 
BONE and ivory ; vine black from 
burnt vine tendrils ; and peach black 
from burnt peach kernels. 

Lamp-black is so-called because it 
was formerly made from the smoke 
of a lamp. 

LAPIS LAZULI, a mineral of a 
beautiful sky-blue color, much used 
for ornament. It is made up chiefly 


of silica (see Silicon), alumina 
(aluminum oxide), and soda, with 
some soda and iron. It is found most¬ 
ly in Persia, China, and Siberia, but 
some is brought from Chili and Cal¬ 
ifornia. Lapis lazuli is used in jew¬ 
elry, and is carved into vases, 
cups, and other ornaments. In one 
of the palaces in St. Petersburg are 
rooms lined with it. It was once 
used for making the blue paint called 
ultramarine, but that is now made 
by mixing together the things of 
which the stone is made up. 

The name lapis lazuli is made up 
of the Latin lapis , stone, and the 
Persian lazur, blue. 

LARCH, a cone-bearing tree, of 
the same family with the pine. It 
grows in Europe, Asia, and Amer¬ 
ica. The American larch is called 
hackmatack in New England and 
tamarack in the South and West. It 
sometimes grows as high as a four- 
story house, but is usually much 
smaller. Its wood is very heavy, 
strong, and lasting, and is much 
used for ship building and for rail¬ 
way ties. Its bark is used for tan¬ 
ning leather. 

The word larch is from the Latin 
larix , the larch tree. 

LARK. The only lark in the 
United States is the American sky 
lark, a pinkish-brown bird, with 
black tail feathers, and yellow chin 
and throat. It lays four or five gray 
eggs, speckled with pale blue and 
brown. The song of the male bird 
when on the wing is very sweet. 
This bird is found all over North 
America from Labrador to the 
Southern United States. It is not 
the same as the European sky lark, 
so celebrated by the poets for its 
song. 

The lark belongs to the order in - 
sessores y or perching BIRDS, and to 
the same family with the sparrow 
and linnet. 

The word lark is from the Anglo- 
Saxon leferc , lark. 

LATH, the name of thin, narrow 
slips of wood, nailed to the up- 




LATH 


345 


LATHE 


rights of partition walls and to 
the rafters of ceilings, to receive the 
plaster, which by being pressed into 
the cracks is held firmly when it 
dries. Laths are now mostly sawn 
by machinery, in steam saw-mills, 
from refuse pieces of pine, hemlock, 
and other lumber, which would 
otherwise be wasted. Roofing 
laths are larger strips of wood, 
nailed across rafters to make a bed 
to nail shingles on. 

The word lath is from the Anglo- 
Saxon lattu , a rod or staff. 


LATHE, or TURNING-LATHE, a 

machine tool for cutting articles of 
wood, metal, etc., into round or 
oval shapes. The way it is made 
will be best understood by the pic¬ 
ture (Fig. i). It has a solid frame, 
F, made usually of heavy wood, but 
sometimes of iron, under which is a 
fly-wheel, A, turned by the treadle 
T, which is worked by the foot like 
the treadle of a sewing-machine. A 
strap which passes round the fly¬ 
wheel connects it with the pulley P, 
and causes the pulley, which is 



Fig. i.—Turning-Lathe. 


fixed to its axle B, to turn round 
very fast. At the other end of the 
frame is the puppet, H, which can be 
moved along the slit in the top of 
the frame and fastened tight in any 
place by screwing up the nut X be¬ 
neath it. The point E can be pushed 
towards B or drawn back by turning 
the handle K, which works a screw 
passing through the puppet. The 
axle B, which is properly called a 
mandrel, has a screw on its end, 
on which is usually screwed a piece 


of iron called a chuck, to hold the 
wood tight. There are many kinds 
of chucks, but the simplest is that 
shown in Fig. 2. 

This chuck is in 
two parts: a 
screws on to the 
mandrel B, and 
the prong b sets 
into the square 
hole in its end. The piece of wood 
to be turned is placed between B and 
E, after the chuck has been put on, 



Fig. 2.—Chuck. 






















































LATHE 


346 


LAUREL 


and the handle K turned until it is 
held firmly. The prongs of b are 
thus pressed into the wood so that it 
must turn round with the mandrel. 
The point E, which holds the other 
end of the wood, does not turn round 
itself, but lets the wood turn round 
on it. The rest, C, may also be 
moved along the slit in the frame to 
any place wanted, and fastened tight¬ 
ly by means of the nut O. 

The wood to be turned having 
been fastened in place between B 
and E, the workman works the 
treadle with his foot and sets the fly¬ 
wheel going. This turns the pulley 
P and the mandrel B, and the wood, 
being held firmly by the chuck, is 
also turned round very rapidly. 
The workman rests his chisel or 
gouge on the rest C, and holds it 
firmly against the wood, which turns 
round against it ; thin shavings are 
thus pared off round and round the 
wood until it is cut into the shape 
wanted. A steady arm and hand 
and much care are needed for turn¬ 
ing, especially when hard wood or 
metals are to be cut. Many kinds 
of tools are used, but chiefly chisels 
and gouges. All the rounded parts 
of furniture, such as the legs of 
tables, chairs, and stools, the balus¬ 
ters of staircases, tool handles, 
round rulers, boys’ peg-tops, and a 
vast number of other things are 
made on the lathe. Not only round 
things, but irregular forms, such as 
the stocks of guns and pistols, and 
shoe lasts, and hollow things, such 
as wooden bowls and dishes, bread 
platters, and boxes, are easily turned. 
Billiard balls and chessmen are 
turned out of ivory, and all the round 
parts of engines and other machines 
are made on various kinds of lathes. 
Lathes for machine work are much 
larger and have more parts to 
them than the common wood lathes, 
and they are usually worked by 
steam. On such lathes, some of 
which are more than fifty feet long, 
the great shafts of steamships are 
turned round and smooth. Another * 


kind of lathe is used by jewellers for 
engraving the patterns on watch 
cases, and a like one is used by 
bank-note engravers for engraving 
the designs on the counters and 
backs Of BANK NOTES. 

LAUREL, a name given to several 
kinds of shrubs, mostly growing in 
hot countries. The true laurel, call¬ 
ed the noble laurel, belongs in the 
south of Europe, where it some¬ 
times grows as tall as a high house. 
It is an evergreen, with beautiful 
glossy leaves, and bears black ber¬ 
ries about the size of wild cherries. 
This is the laurel used for crowns, 
and the custom of crowning poets 
with it gave rise to the title poet 
laureate (Latin laureatus , crowned 
with laurel). It is sometimes called 
the sweet bay tree, and its fruit the 
bayberry (from French bate , Latin 
bacca , a berry). The word bacca¬ 
laureate (from Latin bacca lauri , 
laurel berry), meaning the degree of 
bachelor of arts, the lowest degree 
given in a college, also comes from 
this, because bachelors of arts used to 
wear a wreath of bays or bayberries 
when they were given their degree. 
Laurel or bay leaves are used for 
flavoring in cookery, and also to 
pack round figs in their boxes to 
keep insects from them. 

The American Laurel is not a true 
laurel, but is rightly called kalmia, 
having been named after Peter 
Kalm, a Swedish botanist, who trav¬ 
elled in this country in the last cen¬ 
tury (1748-1751), and wrote a book 
about American plants. The kal¬ 
mia, which is found almost all over 
the United States, grows commonly 
on rocky hillsides. It is a shrub, 
sometimes two or three times as 
high as a man, has thick bright 
green leaves, and bears bunches of 
beautiful pink and white flowers. 
The wood is hard and has a fine 
grain, and is used by turners for 
making tool handles, and by carvers 
for making wooden spoons. Its 
roots are used for making rustic 
seats, flower-stands, etc. 





LAVA 


347 


LEAD 


The word laurel is from the Latin 
laurus , laurel. 

LAVA, the melted matter which 
runs out of volcanoes. It flows like 
melted glass or iron, and is some¬ 
times solid and very hard after cool¬ 
ing, and sometimes light and full of 
little holes like pumice stone. Lava is 
sometimes made into ornaments, by 
pressing it when melted into moulds ; 
but the most of the common lava 
ornaments are made out of iron 
slag, or the glassy matter which 
flows from smelting furnaces. Very 
handsome vases, brooches, and other 
things are made out of it. 

The word lava is Italian, and 
means a flood of rushing water, from 
the Latin lavare , to wash ; and the 
name is given to the matter flowing 
from a volcano, because it is like a 
water flood. 

LAVENDER, a fragrant plant 
much used in making perfumes and 
in medicine. Oil of lavender is made 
by distilling (see Alcohol) the 
flowers of lavender with water ; and 
spirit of lavender by distilling them 
with alcohol. Lavender water is 
made of oil of lavender, spirit, and 
rose water. 

The word lavender is from the 
Latin lavare , to wash, and the plant 
was so called because it was formerly 
used in bathing and washing. 

LEAD, a METAL, and one of the 
principal ELEMENTS. When pure, 
it is bluish gray, very heavy, can be 
easily melted and cut, and may be 
hammered out into sheets and drawn 
into wire. When left in the air it 
oxidizes or rusts slightly so as to 
form a thin coating on its surface, 
which keeps it from further change. 
For this reason it is used for water 
pipes and cisterns, and for covering 
the roofs and gutters of houses. 
But many kinds of water corrode or 
eat lead, and take up from it a kind 
of poison which makes lead pipes 
dangerous to use. 

Lead Ore. Most of the lead used 
in the arts is made by smelting in 
furnaces the ore called galena (lead 


sulphide) which is made up of lead 
and SULPHUR. It is made up mostly 
of lead and sulphur, but generally 
has some silver in it, and also a little 
ANTIMONY, ARSENIC, copper, iron, 
and zinc. Galena ore is found in 
many parts of the world, but the 
purest is in the United States, Eng¬ 
land, and Spain. There are cele¬ 
brated mines of it in Saxony, Bo¬ 
hemia, and in the Hartz Mountains 
in Germany, but the ore from them 
is mixed with other metals, espe¬ 
cially with silver. The chief galena 
mines in the United States are in 
Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Mis¬ 
souri, the most ore being got in the 
country around Galena, Illinois. 

Smelting. The smelting or melt¬ 
ing of the galena ore to get the pure 
lead out of it is done in a furnace 
different from that used in smelting 
iron. The ore is first roasted or 
heated, which drives off some of the 
sulphur and other impurities, and is 
then put into a square furnace, 
which has a pipe called a tuyere 
opening into it behind, through 
which a blast of air is blown, and 
an opening at the lower part of the 
front where the melted metal can 
run out. The fuel, which is either 
wood or charcoal, is put in with the 
ore in layers, and the furnace is kept 
going all the time. As the lead 
melts, it is drawn off at the bottom 
and run into moulds which make it 
into small blocks called “ pigs.” 
Lead smelting is very unhealthful, as 
the fumes or vapors are poisonous, 
and all the grass and other plants 
around the furnaces are killed. 

Sheet Lead is now made by rolling 
slabs of lead between heavy iron roll¬ 
ers until they are brought down to the 
right thinness. This is called “ mill¬ 
ing” the lead. The slabs sometimes 
go through the rollers two or three 
hundred times, each one being cut 
up into pieces as it gets too long to 
be easily handled. Sheet lead is 
made of many thicknesses, which 
are known by numbers, each num¬ 
ber meaning the number of pounds 





LEAD 


348 


LEATHER 


in a square foot of the sheet. Thick 
sheets are used for lining tanks and 
water - cisterns, and for covering 
roofs, and thin sheets for wrapping 
up snuff, lining tea-chests, etc. The 
Chinese make much lead for tea- 
chests by pouring melted lead on a 
flat slab, and then putting another 
flat stone on top of it, thus pressing 
it out thin ; but they get most of 
their sheet lead now from England. 

Lead Pipe used to be made by 
casting a short pipe of the right size 
inside, but much thicker than is 
needed. An iron rod, called a man¬ 
drel, of the size of the inside, was 
then put into it, and the pipe was 
rolled out until it was of the thick¬ 
ness wanted. But pipes only twenty 



Making Lead Pipe. 

or thirty feet long could be made in 
this way, and lead pipe is now com¬ 
monly made by means of a hydro¬ 
static press (see Water), which 
forces melted lead up through tubes 
of the right size. The press, which 
is under the floor of the room where 
the pipe is made, pushes a piston up 
through a strong metal cylinder or 
barrel filled with melted lead. On 
the top of the cylinder is a steel tube 
of the size of the outside of the pipe 
wanted, and through this is pushed 
a mandrel which is fastened to the 
piston, and which is of the size of 
the inside of the pipe. This may 
be understood better from the pic¬ 
ture, where a is the metal cylinder, 
b the piston, c the mandrel fastened 


to the piston, and d the steel tube. 
The cylinder, which is kept hot all 
the time, is filled with melted lead 
through a spout in the top. The 
spout is then closed, and the press 
below pushes up the piston, thus 
forcing the lead through the round 
space between the die and the man¬ 
drel. As the lead comes out at the 
top it cools in the form of a pipe, 
and is wound round a drum or barrel 
above. This is why lead pipe usu¬ 
ally comes coiled round in rolls. 

Uses of Lead. Lead is used not 
only alone, but also in ALLOY with 
other metals. When mixed with 
arsenic it forms the alloy from 
which SHOT are made ; with TIN, 
PEWTER and solder ; and with 
ANTixMONY, TYPE metal. Among 
the most useful compounds of lead 
are white lead (lead carbonate), 
made up of lead and CARBONIC 
ACID, much used for making white 
paint, red lead (red lead oxide), made 
up of lead and OXYGEN, used for 
making red paint ; litharge (yellow 
lead oxide), made up also of lead 
and oxygen, used in GLASS making ; 
sugar of lead (lead acetate), made 
up of lead and acetic acid, used in 
calico printing ; and chrome yellow 
(lead chromate), made up of lead 
and chromic acid, used for making 
yellow paint. 

The word lead is Anglo-Saxon. 

LEATHER. The hide or skin of 
an animal, which is called a pelt be¬ 
fore it is made into leather, is form¬ 
ed of two parts, the epidermis, or 
cuticle, in which the hair grows, and 
the dermis, or cutis, which lies under 
the cuticle and next to the flesh. 
The cutis is made up of many little 
fibres or threads which cross each 
other in all directions, the spaces 
between being filled with gelatine, 
which keeps the skin soft and flexi¬ 
ble while the animal is living. The 
fibres themselves are also mostly 
gelatine. When the skin is first taken 
off an animal it is soft and easily 
stretched, but as soon as it dries it 
shrinks and the gelatine in it be- 













LEATHER 


349 


LEATHER 


comes hard and horny ; if too it is 
put into water, the water will soak 
into it and the gelatine will soon be¬ 
gin to decay and to smell bad. But 
if all the fatty and fleshy matter be 
scraped off the skin, and it be soak¬ 
ed in certain 'liquids containing tan¬ 
nin or tannic ACID, the gelatine in 
the skin will separate all the tannin 
from the liquid and unite with it, 
forming leather. 

Hides to be tanned, that is, made 
into leather, are first soaked in water 
about two weeks, after which they are 
soaked in deep square holes called 
vats, filled with lime water, for sev¬ 
eral days more, to loosen the hairs. 
They are next scraped on both 
sides, on the upper side to get off 
the hair or wool, and on the lower 
to remove any pieces of flesh or fat 
which may still stick to it. The next 
thing is to get out the lime. This 
is done by soaking the hides in a 
mixture made usually of hen dung 
and water, for about a week, which 
takes out the lime and makes the 
skins soft and pliant. They are now 
ready for tanning, which means 
soaking them in a mixture of tan- 
bark and water for four or five 
months, during which time they are 
frequently changed from one vat to 
another. The best tan is made from 
oak or hemlock bark, though other 
kinds are sometimes used. In the 
United States hemlock is most used. 
The bark is ground up in a bark 
mill, and the tannin is then got out 
of it with either hot or cold water. 
There are many different ways of 
making leather, but the object in all 
is the same—to make the tannin of 
the bark unite with the gelatine of 
the hide. 

When the hides are tanned 
enough, they are taken out of the 
vats, washed, drained, and dried in 
lofts, after which they are hardened 
by being hammered or rolled under 
heavy rollers. Sometimes thick 
skins are split into two by a knife 
working by machinery, which divides 
them evenly and smoothly. The 


upper or hair side of a split skin is 
better than the under side, which is 
used only for the cheaper kinds of 
work. Thin skins are treated some¬ 
what differently from thick ones, but 
the principle is the same. Calfskins 
and other upper leathers are rubbed 
with oil and tallow to make them 
soft, and then blacked with oil, 
lamp-black, and tallow. 

Patent Leather. Skins for making 
patent leather are first tacked on to 
frames and covered with several 
coatings of linseed oil and umber 
(see Paints), mixed with a little 
LAMP-BLACK, and then varnished 
several times with a varnish made of 
linseed oil and Prussian blue, thin¬ 
ned with spirits of turpentine. The 
leather is scraped and smoothed 
with pumice stone, and is then dried 
in ovens heated as hot as it will 
bear. Enamelled leather, used for 
carriage tops, is made in nearly the 
same way, only a thinner coating is 
put on, so that the grain of the 
leather shows. 

Russia Leather, noted for its 
pleasant smell, is tanned with willow 
bark, which has but little tannin in 
it and therefore tans it very slowly. 
It is then treated with birch bark 
tar, but in what way is not exactly 
known. Moths and other insects do 
not like the scent of Russia leather, 
and will not eat books bound with it. 

Morocco Leather is so called be¬ 
cause it was first brought from Mo¬ 
rocco. It is mostly made from goats’ 
skins, but a cheap kind is made out 
of sheep skins. After the skins have 
been cleaned each one is sewed up 
by its edges into the form of a bag, 
the hair side being on the outside. 
A strong mixture of SUMACH and 
water is then put into it, and it is 
blown full of air and sewn up. 
About fifty such skins are thrown 
into a large tub of hot sumach liquor, 
and left to float a few hours, after 
which they are unsewn, scraped, and 
dried. They are colored with different 
things, red morocco with COCHI¬ 
NEAL, yellow with barberry root, 







LEMON 


350 


LENS 


blue with indigo, etc. Much mo¬ 
rocco is now made in France and in 
the United States. It is largely used 
for covering chairs and sofas, for 
lining coaches, for book-binding, and 
for making pocket-books. 

Kid Leather is used for the finest 
gloves and ladies’ shoes. Lamb 
skin is also much used for gloves, 
most of those called dog skin gloves 
being made from it. What is called 
chamois or shamoy leather is made 
mostly from sheep, goat, and deer 
skins. Sheep skin is also largely 
used for book-binding, and for many 
other purposes. Hog skin is used 
for covering saddles, horse hide for 
harnesses, collars, etc., and cow 
hide for soles of boots and shoes. 
The tops of fine boots and shoes for 
men are mostly made of calves’ 
skin. A fine leather is made from 
seal skin, and the skins of young 
alligators are sometimes tanned for 
boots and shoes. 

Leather scraps are now ground 
up and mixed with certain fluids 
until they are made into a kind of 
pulp or paste. This paste is press¬ 
ed into moulds of different shapes, 
and when dried is hard and tough. 
Many useful articles are thus made, 
among which are door knobs, canes, 
combs, cups, and buttons. 

The word leather is from the 
Anglo-Saxon lith or lither , meaning 
a soft or lithe thing. 

LEMON, the fruit of a tree be¬ 
longing to the same family with the 
ORANGE, lime, CITRON, and SHAD¬ 
DOCK. The lemon grows wild in 
southern Asia, and is cultivated all 
around the Mediterranean Sea and 
in the West Indies and other warm 
parts of America. The tree is much 
like the orange tree, and is grown 
in the same way. There are about 
thirty kinds, which differ mostly in 
the shape, size, roughness, and 
thickness of skin of the fruit. One 
kind, which grows in southern 
Europe, has sweet juice, but all the 
rest are very sour, the juice contain¬ 
ing much citric acid. The lemons we 


buy come mostly from Sicily, but 
fine ones are raised in Florida and 
California. 

The juice of lemons is used for 
cooling drinks and as a medicine in 
cases of fever, scurvy, etc. It is 
also used by calico printers to make 
clear the white parts of patterns in 
cloths dyed with dyes which have 
iron in them. Citric acid and lemon 
syrup are made from it. The oil of 
lemons, pressed out of the outside 
part of the rind, is used by cooks, 
confectioners, and perfumers. Ex¬ 
tract of lemon is made by mixing 
this oil with alcohol. Salt of lem¬ 
ons, used for taking out ink spots, 
has no lemon in it, but is made from 
oxalic acid and potash. 

The Lime, which is like a small 
lemon in shape and is also like it in 
the sourness of its juice, grows wild 
in the West Indies, where it is used 
as a hedge plant. Its uses are the 
same as those of the lemon. A 
sweet lime grows in the south of 
Europe. 

The word lemon is from the Ara¬ 
bic laimtin, lemon. 

LENS. In the article Light (Fig. 
5) is given the picture of a convex 
lens, or one rounded outward on 
both sides. Such a lens, also shown 
in A, is called, therefore, a double- 



Lenses. 


convex lens. A lens which is con¬ 
vex on one side and plane or flat on 
the other, as in B, is called a plano¬ 
convex lens ; one like C, which is 
concave, or rounded inward, on 
both sides, a double-concave lens ; 
and one plane on one side and con¬ 
cave on the other, as in D, a plano¬ 
concave lens. 

Lenses are usually made of thick, 
flat pieces of glass ground down into 








LEOPARD 


35i 


LEWIS 


the shape wanted by means of a 
grinding powder of sand or EMERY, 
and afterward polished with a softer 
powder. The greatest care is need¬ 
ed in grinding and polishing lenses 
for telescopes and microscopes, as 
the least unevenness in the surface 
would spoil them. Lenses for such 
instruments are made of the best 
crown or flint glass, and it is very 
hard to make large pieces of glass 
perfect enough for the purpose. 

Lenses have many uses. The 
common burning glass is a double- 
convex lens, which brings the sun’s 
rays to a point, as told about in 
Light (page 355). As these rays 
contain heat also, the heat is thus 
brought to a point and made to burn 
anything which is placed where the 
point falls. Convex lenses are used 
for making eye-glasses and specta¬ 
cles for far-sighted persons, and 
singly as magnifying glasses. Con¬ 
cave lenses are used in spectacles by 
near-sighted persons. Various lenses 
are used in making opera glasses, 
MICROSCOPES, STEREOSCOPES,TEL¬ 
ESCOPES, and other like instruments. 

The word lens is from the Latin 
lens, a lentil seed, which is much 
like the shape of a convex lens. 

LEOPARD. An animal found wild 
in Africa and in India. It is usually 
about the size of a very large dog, 
but is shaped more like a cat, and 
has a tail nearly as long as its body. 
Its fur is tawny yellow, beautifully 
spotted with black. The leopard is 
a very active and graceful animal. 
It lives mostly in thick forests, feed¬ 
ing upon antelopes, deer, and small¬ 
er animals, but sometimes comes 
around farms to steal pigs and poul¬ 
try. It is a good climber, and often 
chases monkeys into the tops of 
trees. Some think that the leopard 
and the PANTHER are only different 
kinds of the same animal. 

The African Hunting Leopard, or 
cheetah, looks both like a dog and a 
cat, and is sometimes called the 
dog-cat. It is trained to chase other 
animals like a hound. Another kind 


in Asia is used for the same pur¬ 
pose. These leopards are blindfold¬ 
ed and led to the hunting-field by a 
chain, just as greyhounds are. When 
an animal is seen their eyes are un¬ 
covered and they are let go, and they 
very soon catch the game and suck 
its blood, but leave the body for their 
master. These animals are very 
tame, and live in families like com¬ 
mon cats. 

The leopard is a mammal of the 
order carnivora, or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the cat family, to which 
belongs also the lion, tiger, pan¬ 
ther, COUGUAR, JAGUAR, LYNX, 
and common CAT. 

The word leopard is from the Latin 
leo, lion, and fiardus, panther. 

LETTUCE, a common plant, the 
leaves of which are much used for 
salad. There are many kinds, divid¬ 
ed into two different sorts, called 
cos lettuce, which does not grow in 
heads, and cabbage lettuce, which 
forms heads like a cabbage. Let¬ 
tuce is worth very little for food, but 
is easy of di- 
gestion. A 
kind of opium, 
called lactuca - 
rium, is made 
from its juice, 
and used in 
medicine. 

The word 
lettuce is from 
the Latin lac¬ 
tuca, which is 
from lac, milk, 
the plant hav¬ 
ing a milky 
juice. 

LEWIS, an 

iron clam p 
made to fit in¬ 
to a hole cut 
in a stone, to Lewis, 

raise it by. 

Its form will be best understood 
from the picture, where the lewis is 
shown fitted into its place. When 
the stone has been raised to the 
place wanted, the rope and pulley 













LICHENS 


352 


LIGHT 


are unhooked from the half-ring r , 
and the bolt d d is driven out; the 
part c may then be drawn up, and 
this lets out the parts b a. The 
lewis is then ready to be put into 
another stone, the parts b a being set 
in first, and the part c then driven 
in, which holds them in place. 
The lewis is said to have been first 
found out in the time of Louis XIV., 
and to have been named after him, 
but some think it was in use long be¬ 
fore him. 

LICHENS, a kind of plants without 
separate stems or leaves, which grow 
on rocks, on the bark of trees, on 
earth, etc. They are sometimes 
wrongly called rock moss and tree 
moss, but they are not MOSSES, 
which have separate stems and 
leaves. Lichens have no roots, but 
live on air, and fasten themselves to 
almost everything where dryness and 
moisture can be found. The gray, 
yellow, and brown stains on old 
walls are made of very small lich¬ 
ens which grow where nothing else 
can grow. They are found all over 
the world, in the hottest and in the 
coldest regions, on the rocks of 
newly-formed islands in the ocean, 
and on the tops of the highest 
mountains. 

Lichens contain a kind of starch, 
a bitter substance, a resin, various 
coloring matters, and a little lime, 
salt, and iron ; and they are of great 
use to man, both as food and medi¬ 
cine. 

They also give rich dyestuffs, 
such as archil, orchil, or cudbear, 
which make red, purple, violet, and 
lilac dyes, used in dyeing silks. Cud¬ 
bear (for Cuthbert) is a kind of archil 
made in a way first found out by 
Dr. Cuthbert Gordon, who named it 
after himself. The purple dye call¬ 
ed litmus, with which litmus paper, 
used for testing ACIDS and ALKA¬ 
LIES, is colored, is made from 
archil. 

Iceland Moss, of which blanc¬ 
mange is often made, is a lichen 
which grows in the most barren 


parts of Iceland and in other cold 
countries. It makes a very good 
food for cattle, sheep, swine, and 
deer, and the Icelanders make both 
bread and soup of it. Another 
lichen, called Mary’s grass by the 
Icelanders, is also much used in the 
same way. In Lapland and north¬ 
ern Siberia the reindeer lichen cov¬ 
ers barren plains where scarcely 
anything else will grow, and is the 
chief food of the reindeers. Once, 
when grain was very scarce in 
Sweden, this lichen was ground up 
with flour to make bread. Another 
kind of lichen is found on the great 
steppes of Asia, and is much used 
for food by the wandering tribes. It 
is found in round pieces about as 
large as filberts, and looks like little 
stones. The people there think that 
it falls from heaven. Tripe de roche 
(rock tripe) is the name given to a 
lichen growing in the northernmost 
parts of North America, which the 
Indians eat, mixed with the roe of 
fishes. 

The word lichen is Latin, and 
comes from the Greek leichen , which 
means the same as our word. 

LIGHT. We do not know ex¬ 
actly what light is. We only know 
that it comes to us from luminous 
(Latin lumen , light) bodies, that is, 
bodies which give out light them¬ 
selves, such as the sun, the fixed 
stars, and some meteors, in the 
heavens, and from burning sub¬ 
stances on earth, such as burning 
wood, gas, tallow, and oil. It is 
also given out by some animals, such 
as glow-worms and fire-flies, and by 
the multitudes of little animals in 
the sea which often make the waves 
shine and sparkle. When we look 
at the sun or at the flame of a can¬ 
dle the light from it comes straight 
into our eyes and makes an image 
there, and thus we are enabled to 
see it. The light from every lumi¬ 
nous body shines from it in straight 
lines, each one of which is called a 
ray of light. If we let a sunbeam 
shine into a dark room through a lit- 






LIGHT 


353 


LIGHT 


tie hole in the shutter, it will be 
seen to be straight. 

We cannot tell certainly how light 
comes to us, though most writers 
think it travels in waves in much the 
same way that sound travels ; but 
it goes much faster than sound. 
When a cannon is fired off at a dis¬ 
tance we see the flash, and some 
time afterward we hear the sound. 
We thus know that light and sound 
do not travel at the same rate, be¬ 
cause when we stand near the gun 
we see the flash and hear the re¬ 
port at the same time. It has been 
found out in different ways that 
light travels nearly 200,000 miles 
(186,000) a second, or more than a 
million times faster than sound. 
It therefore takes the light of the 
sun eight minutes to travel from the 
sun to the earth. All light travels 
with the same speed, so that the light 
of a candle goes just as fast as the 
light of the sun. Light will also 
travel a great deal further than 
sound ; we often see lightning so far 
off that we cannot hear its thunder. 
The light waves and the sound 
waves start to come to us about the 
same time, but the thunder cannot 
pass through the air so fast as the 
lightning, and it dies away before it 
reaches us. 

We get light also from bodies or 
things which are not luminous, such 
as the moon, houses, trees, and 
persons, but it comes to us in a 
different way from the light of the 
sun and the light from fire. They 
do not give out any light themselves, 
but the light which shines on them 
from something else glances off and 
comes from them into our eyes. 
When we look at the sun, the light 
from it comes straight into our eyes, 
as told above ; but when we look 
at a house, the light goes first lo the 
house from the sun, and then glances 
from it into our eyes, and thus we 
are able to see a thing which does 
not make any light itself. When 
light glances off in this way it is said 
to be reflected (Latin rejiectere , 


to bend or turn backward). Light 
is often reflected a good many times 
before it reaches our eyes. We can 
see a tree by moonlight, but we 
know that neither the tree nor the 
moon make any light themselves ; 
we say therefore that the light of the 
sun is reflected by the moon to the 
tree, and then by the tree to our 
eyes. If now we hold a mirror in 
our hand so that we can see the 
tree in it, the light from the tree 
will be again reflected or bent out 
of its course by the mirror. 

When you look into a mirror you 
see an image or picture of your face. 
This is because the light which 
strikes your face is reflected from it 
to the mirror and is then reflected 
again from the mirror into your 
eyes ; and the image or picture 
which the light from your face makes 
in the mirror is made again, but 
much smaller, in the back part of 
your eyes. The image in the glass 
is an exact copy of your face, only 
that its right side is your left side, 
and its left side your right side. This 
will be seen better by holding a 
printed book before a mirror, when 
all the letters will appear to be 
turned, so that they will read from 
right to left instead of from left to 
right. The image appears to be be¬ 
hind the glass as far as your face is 
in front of it ; if you go closer to the 
mirror the image comes closer 
also, and if you draw back the image 
draws back. If now you lay the 
mirror down flat with its face up¬ 
ward and place a candle at the fur¬ 
ther end of it, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture, the image of the candle will 
appear upside down. This is be¬ 
cause the ray of light which comes 
from the candle A to the mirror M M 
is reflected from the mirror to the 
eye in just the same way as it would 
be if it came from a candle upside 
down, B, as much below the surface 
of the mirror as the real candle is 
above it. In the same way the 
images of houses and trees in water 
always look upside down. We see 




LIGHT 


354 


LIGHT 


them just as if they were under the 
water instead of above it. 

When a slanting ray of light falls 
on water, glass, ice, or anything 
through which it can shine, it is 
bent so as to be less slanting after it 
enters the water, glass, etc. ; and if 
a ray of light comes out of water, 
glass, etc., into the air, it is bent so 


as to be more slanting after it en¬ 
ters the air. This is shown in the 
picture, Fig. 2, where a b c d is a 
ray of light shining through a thjck 
flat piece of glass : a b is the ray 
before it enters the glass ; b c is the 
same bent by the glass so as to be 
less slanting ; and c d is the same 
after it leaves the glass and enters 



the air again, having the same slant 
as it had at first, but in a different 
line. Light is thus bent out of its 
straight path only when it passes 
from one thing into another thing of 
a different density or thickness, as, 
for example, from air into water or 
glass. This bending of a ray of 
light is called refraction (Latin re¬ 


el. 



Fig. 2.—Refraction of Light. 

frangere , to bend or break back, 
from re , back, and frangere , to 
break), and a ray thus bent is said 
to be refracted. If you put a stick 
slanting into the water, it will look 
as if it were bent at the point where 
it enters the water, and the part 
under water will be less slanting 
than the part out of water. This is 


because the light from the stick is re¬ 
fracted by the water, which is denser 
or thicker than the air. 

Now put a pebble at the bottom 
of a pitcher close to the side, place 
your eye so that the side of the pitch¬ 
er just hides the pebble, and then 
let some one fill the pitcher with 
water. The pebble will at once 
come into view. You have not 
moved your eye, nor the pitcher, 
nor the pebble, yet you can now 
see the pebble plainly. This seems 
as if you could look round a corner, 
and it is what your really do, for the 
ray of light which comes from the 
pebble is refracted after it leaves 
the water and thus enters your eye. 

It is shown in Fig. 2 that after a 
ray of light has passed from air 
through a piece of flat glass into air 
again, the ray has the same slant 
after coming out of the glass as it 
had before it went into the glass, 
but in a different line. Suppose 
now that the piece of glass is three- 
cornered or wedge-shaped instead of 
flat, as shown in Fig. 3. A piece 
thus shaped is called a prism. A 
ray of light passed through a prism 
is bent or refracted in a different 
way from one passed through a flat 












LIGHT 


355 


LIGHT 


piece of glass, as will be seen in 
Fig. 4, where a b c shows a prism 
cut across ; A B is the ray before it 
enters the prism, B C the ray bent 
in the prism, and C D the 
ray after it leaves the prism. 
It will be seen from this that 
when a ray of light passes 
through a prism, it is bent 
after coming out into a dif¬ 
ferent slant from that which 
it had before it went into 
the prism, and that this 
slant is always toward the 



Fig. 3 - 
Prism. 


base or thicker part of the prism. 

Next let the ray of light shine 
through another piece of glass 
shaped round, and thick in the mid- 



Fig. 4.—Refraction of Light by a Prism. 


die and thin all round the edge, so 
that when you see it sidewise it 
looks like the piece in Fig. 5. A 
piece of glass made into this shape 


is called a lens. Now a lens is 
really a round wedge, and light 
when passed through it is bent in 
much the same way as it is when 
passed through the wedge-shaped 
prism, that is, it is made to slant 
toward the thickest part of the 
wedge. In Fig. 5, ABCDE are 
several rays of light shining on a 
lens ; after passing through the lens 



Fig. 5.—Refraction of Light by a Lens. 


each ray is bent or refracted toward 
the thicker part of the wedge, and 
as this thicker part is the middle of 
the lens all the rays are thus made 
to slant toward the middle so that 
they come to a point, as shown in F. 

In Fig. 4 is shown how a ray of 
light is bent in passing through a 
prism. If we look a little further 
we shall see that every kind of light 
is not bent in the same way. The 



Fig. 6.—Division of Light into its Colors by a Prism. 


light which comes from the sun is 
white, but it is in reality a mixture 
of several different colors, such as 
we see in the rainbow. When a 
beam of light is made to pass 
through a prism, the colors, each 
of which is bent in a different way 
after coming out of the prism, are all 
separated, and we can see each one 
by itself. We can thus divide light 


into the different parts of which it is 
made up. Sir Isaac Newton first 
found out how to do this. He let a 
beam of sunlight shine into a dark 
room through a small hole in a shut¬ 
ter, as shown in Fig. 6, where D E 
is the beam of light. There was a 
screen at F, and when the beam of 
light shone straight through the 
hole it made a round white spot on 
























LIGHTNING 


356 


LIGHTNING 


the screen. He then placed a prism 
in the way of the beam so that it 
would have to pass through it. 
This bent the light out of its path, 
and the different colors being bent 
or refracted in different ways, they 
were separated, and formed on the 
screen, instead of a circle, an oblong 
figure such as is shown in the pic¬ 
ture. We see by this that a beam 
of white light may be divided into 
seven different colors, violet, indigo, 
blue, green, yellow, orange, and 
red. From this we know that sun¬ 
light is not a simple thing, but that 
it is made up of seven colors. We 
often see these colors separated 
in dew drops, in ice, in diamonds, 
and in the rainbow. 

Now, when we look at a blue 
thing or a red thing, or a thing of 
any other color, why does it look 
blue, red, etc., to us? Because 
when a beam of white light falls on 
a blue thing it is separated and only 
the blue rays are reflected to our 
eyes, while the other six colors are 
absorbed by it, that is, they are 
taken up and kept by it. It is the 
same with a red thing : it reflects 
the red rays to our eyes and keeps 
the other colors ; and so with other 
colors. If we look at a blue or red 
thing in the dark, we do not see any¬ 
thing. It has color only when the 
light comes to it. When a thing 
reflects all the colors it looks white ; 
and when a thing absorbs all the 
colors it looks black. 

The word light is from the Anglo- 
Saxon lyht, bright. 

LIGHTNING. Dr. Franklin first 
showed that lightning is the same as 
the ELECTRICITY made by the elec¬ 
trical machine, as is told about under 
Kite. As the electricity of the 
electrical machine is got by rubbing 
glass, so much of the electricity of 
the air is caused by the rubbing of 
moist air against dry air. A great 
deal is made by the turning into 
vapor or mist of the salt water of 
the ocean by the sun’s heat or the 
blowing of the wind. There is more 


water turned into vapor during the 
heat of summer and autumn than in 
winter, and this is the reason why 
there is more lightning in warm 
weather than in cold weather. 
There is always a good deal of elec¬ 
tricity in the air, and in clear 
weather it is generally positive elec¬ 
tricity, but during fogs, rains, or 
snows it is usually negative electric¬ 
ity, though it changes often. Some¬ 
times it happens that two clouds, 
one charged with positive electricity 
and the other with negative electric¬ 
ity, come near each other, and then 
the two kinds of electricity rush to¬ 
gether and we see a flash of light¬ 
ning and hear thunder. The light¬ 
ning is the same thing as a spark 
from an electrical machine, the only 
difference being that a flash of light¬ 
ning is sometimes several miles 
long and the spark only a few inches. 
The little spark which we make 
gives out only a snapping sound, 
but if we were able to make a spark 
as large as a flash of lightning it 
would make as much noise as thun¬ 
der. When a cloud filled with one 
kind of electricity comes near the 
earth at a time when it is filled with 
the opposite kind, the cloud may 
discharge its electricity to the earth. 
If any tall thing, such as a tree, a 
steeple, or a house, happen to be 
near where the cloud discharges, 
the electricity will often pass down 
it to the earth. In this way houses 
are sometimes injured and set on 
fire and great trees are split up into 
small pieces. Sometimes, too, hu¬ 
man beings and animals are struck 
and killed. It is not safe, therefore, 
to stand under a tree or close to a 
high house during a thunder storm. 

We see lightning in several differ¬ 
ent forms : sometimes its flash is 
straight, sometimes it looks forked 
or zig-zag, sometimes it is round 
like a ball, and sometimes it spreads 
over the clouds like a sheet of fire. 
When a thunder cloud is near the 
earth the flash comes straight down 
to the earth, because there is but 




LIGHTNING 


357 


LILAC 


little air for it to pass through, but 
when the cloud is at a considerable 
distance from the earth, the air in 
the path of the lightning is made 
denser or Ihicker by being pushed 
together, and as lightning can pass 
quicker through thin than through 
thick air, it flies from side to side so 
as to pass where it is thinnest. This 
makes its path zig-zag or forked. 
When there is a very great charge 
of electricity in a cloud it sometimes 
forces its way through the air in the 
shape of a ball. What is called 
sheet lightning is either the reflection 
or shine on clouds of a stroke of 
zig-zag lightning which is too far off 
to be seen, or light discharges of 
electricity from clouds which have 
not enough in them to make zig-zag 
lightning. 

When lightning passes through 
air it leaves behind it a vacuum, 
that is, an empty place, and the air 
rushing in to fill it makes the noise 
which we call thunder. We do not 
usually hear this until some time 
after the flash of lightning, because 
light travels more than a million 
times faster than sound. When the 
thunder cloud is at a distance, the 
sound comes to us little by little, 
and we then call it rolling thunder ; 
but when the cloud is near the earth 
the sound comes in one great crash. 
You can generally tell how far off a 
thunder cloud is by noting how long 
the time is between the flash of 
lightning and the sound of the thun¬ 
der. If you can count five as slowly 
as the tick of a clock between the 
two, you may be sure that the cloud 
is more than a mile away. 

Lightning, in its way to the earth, 
will always follow the best conduct¬ 
or, and when it strikes a building 
or a tree it will leap from side to side 
to find it. It likes pointed things 
better than round or blunt things, 
and this is the reason why lightning 
rods are made with sharp points. 
Buildings properly fitted with light¬ 
ning rods are safe from being struck 
by lightning, because the rods lead 


off the electricity into the earth. 
When a cloud filled with electricity 
comes over the rods, the electricity 
will flow silently down them until 
the cloud is discharged, and we 
see no flash and hear no thunder; 
but we feel sure that the building 
will not be struck. The tops of 
lightning rods are usually made of 
silver or are gilded, so that they 
may not rust and thus become 
worthless. The lower end of the rod 
must be carried down into damp 
earth ; if the earth is dry it is better 
to carry the end into a well, because 
dry earth is not so good a conduct¬ 
or as moist earth, and the lightning 
might leap from the rod at the 
lower end and go into the cellar of 
the building. High chimneys should 
have rods on them, because the soot 
in them is a good conductor, as is 
also the vapor which rises from 
them when fires are burning. 

The word lightning is from lighten¬ 
ing, which is from the Anglo-Saxon 
lyhting , lightning. 

LIGNUM VIT/E, the wood of the 
guaiacum tree, which grows in the 
West Indies and Central America. 
It is very heavy, hard, close grained, 
and tough ; in the middle or heart 
of the trunk it is greenish brown, 
while the sap wood, or wood around 
the heart, is pale yellow. It is used 
for making rulers, pulleys, the 
sheaves or wheels in ships’ blocks, 
pestles, and other articles which 
need to be of a tough material. The 
resinous juice of the tree, wrongly 
called gum guaiacum, is used in 
medicine in cases of rheumatism, 
skin diseases, etc. 

Lignum vitas means wood of life, 
and is from the Latin lignum , wood, 
and vitcB , of life. 

LILAC, a flowering shrub of the 
same family with the olive. The 
common lilac has flowers of a blu¬ 
ish pink, usually called lilac color, 
but other kinds have white, red, or 
violet flowers, all being very fra¬ 
grant. An oil for perfumery is some¬ 
times distilled (see Alcohol) from 




LIME 


358 


LINDEN 


them. Lilac wood has a fine grain, 
and is used for turning and inlaying. 
The lilac is supposed to have come 
first from Persia, and was brought 
to Europe about three hundred years 
ago. 

The word lilac is from the Turk¬ 
ish leilak , lilac. 

LIME. See LEMON. 

LIME, usually called quicklime, 
the oxide of CALCIUM. It is a hard, 
white substance, and cannot be 
melted ; it is therefore much used in 
making crucibles for melting the hard¬ 
est metals. When moistened with 



Lime Kiln. 


water it swells up, gives off much 
heat and steam, takes up hydro¬ 
gen from the water, and changes 
into a soft white powder, commonly 
called slaked lime, (calcium hy¬ 
drate). So much heat is caused by 
the union of lime with water that 
buildings and ships have sometimes 
been set on fire by it. Slaked 
lime is much used for purifying coal 
GAS, for making mortar and plaster 
for ceilings, for removing the hair 
from skins in tanning, in making 
paper pulp, and as a manure for 
land. 


Lime is made commonly by burn¬ 
ing limestone (calcium carbonate) 
in furnaces called kilns. A lime 
kiln is usually built against the side 
of a hill, as shown in the picture. 
An arch of limestone is first made 
across the inside, above where the 
fire is to be, and the rest of the lime¬ 
stone is then piled on it until the kiln 
is filled. Wood is generally used for 
fuel, and the fire is kept up three or 
four days, when all the carbonic 
acid will have been driven off, and 
only the calcium oxide left. Lime is 
sometimes made also by burning 
marble, and oyster and other shells. 
Besides the uses already mentioned, 
lime is used in the making of caus¬ 
tic SODA and caustic POTASH, in the 
manufacture of bleaching powder 
and ammonia water, in refining 
sugar, as a flux (see Iron) in 
smelting metals, and for many other 
things. Bleaching powder, com¬ 
monly called chloride of lime, is 
made by passing CHLORINE gas into 
chambers filled with layers of pow¬ 
dered slaked lime. Chloride of lime 
is a dry white powder, with a slight 
acid smell. When left in the air it 
takes up carbonic acid and gives off 
chlorine, which destroys bad smells. 
It is therefore much used for puri¬ 
fying drains, sewers, and other bad¬ 
smelling places. But its chief use is 
for bleaching cotton and linen cloths, 
and great quantities of it are made 
every year for this purpose. 

The word lime is from the Anglo- 
Saxon lint, lime. 

LINDEN, a family of trees growing 
in Europe, Asia, and North Amer¬ 
ica. These trees are also called 
lime trees, in the north of Europe 
bast trees, and in the United States 
basswood trees. The linden is a 
large, beautiful tree, with thick fo¬ 
liage, and makes a fine shade for 
streets and avenues. The principal 
street of Berlin is called Unter den 
Linden (Under the Lindens), from 
the lindens with which it is lined. 
The flowers of lindens are very 
sweet, and are much liked by bees. 



































LINEN 


359 


LION 


In Germany and in the Western 
United States great quantities of fine 
honey are made near the forests of 
these trees. 

Linden wood is light and soft, but 
tough and lasting, and is much used 
by carvers and turners. The white 
wood carved toys and other wares 
brought from the Tyrol and South 
Germany are made of it. Wooden 
bowls and boxes, the seats of chairs, 
sounding boards for pianos, etc., 
are also made of it. Its charcoal is 
used for tooth-powder and for mak¬ 
ing crayons and gunpowder, and 
its inner bark is the bast of com¬ 
merce, from which mats, coarse 
sacking, fishing-nets, ropes and 
cordage, and baskets, are made.' 

The word linden is from the An- 
gla-Saxon lind , linden. 

LINEN, cloth woven out of flax 
threads. In the article Flax is 
told how the fibres of the flax plant 
are made ready for spinning into 
thread. In old times thread was 
spun by women on spinning wheels 
turned by hand, but now it is mostly 
made by machines. For the finest 
kinds of cambrics and for laces, 
however, the threads are still made 
by hand. Linen cloths, too, were 
once made by hand, but they are 
now woven almost wholly by ma¬ 
chinery. The chief kinds of cloth 
made are lawn, cambric, damask, 
diaper, sheeting, and towelling. 
The best linens are made in France, 
Belgium, Holland, and Great Brit¬ 
ain. Most of the linen used in the 
United States is brought from Eu¬ 
rope. 

The word linen is from the Latin 
linum, flax. 

LINSEED, the seed of FLAX. The 
seeds are rich in mucilage and in oil, 
and make excellent food for cattle 
and poultry; but they are used 
chiefly for making into oil and oil¬ 
cake. In making oil the seeds are 
first ground or crushed and then 
pressed either cold or heated by 
steam. The seeds give more oil 
when heated, but the cold pressed 


oil is the best. The remains of the 
seeds, after the oil is pressed out, 
make oil-cake, which is valuable for 
feeding cattle. Linseed oil is largely 
used in making paints, varnishes, 
and printing inks. It is generally 
boiled, because paint mixed with it 
dries more quickly in the air than 
when mixed with raw oil. 

The word linseed is from the 
Anglo-Saxon lin, flax, and seed, 
seed. 

LION. This animal, which is the 
largest of the cat family, is found 
only in Asia and in Africa. The 
Asiatic lion is not so large nor so 
fierce as the African lion, and has a 
smaller mane. The African lion is 
one of the strongest of beasts, and 
can drag away a good-sized ox or 
horse. It is generally six or seven 
feet long, and about three feet high 
at the shoulder. The male has a 
long thick mane, which gives his 
head a large and noble appearance, 
but the female has no mane. The 
tail has a tuft at the end, while that 
of the tiger and leopard is smooth. 
The lion is always of one color, 
that is, without spots or stripes, gen¬ 
erally tawny, but the mane is darker, 
sometimes nearly black. It gets its 
full growth when seven or eight 
years old, and lives usually about 
twenty-five years, though some have 
lived much longer in menageries. 

Lions live where game is plenty, 
usually in an open country where 
herds of animals feed and near 
places where there are woods enough 
to protect them from the hot sun. 
They generally hide away in the day¬ 
time, and prowl around in the even¬ 
ing and early morning, and some¬ 
times all night long, in search of 
food. This is because they see much 
better in the night than in the day¬ 
time. They feed chiefly on ante¬ 
lopes, zebras, giraffes, and wild cat¬ 
tle, but sometimes carry off horses, 
sheep, and other domestic animals, 
and when very hungry will attack 
men ; but it is generally only old 
lions whose teeth are too poor to 




LION 


360 


LION 


hunt who prowl around villages for 
food. 

The lion is so savage and fierce in 
his wild state that many people 
think it a very wonderful sight to see 
men go into their cages in menage¬ 
ries ; but the lion is easily tamed 
and can be trained with but little 
trouble. In ancient times they were 
used in many ways. Hanno, the 
Carthaginian general, had a lion to 
carry his baggage, and Mark Antony 
often rode in the streets of Rome in 
a chariot drawn by lions. A story 
is told by one of the old writers of a 
slave named Androclus, who while 
hiding away from his master in the 
desert in Africa cured a lion of lame¬ 
ness by pulling a thorn out of its 
foot. He was afterward caught, 
carried to Rome, and condemned to 
- be eaten by wild beasts. He was 
thrown into the den of a lion, but 
the beast, instead of tearing him to 
pieces, fawned upon him and show¬ 
ed the greatest delight at seeing 
him, and Androclus was astonished 
to find that it was the same lion 
whose wounded foot he had cured in 
Africa. The emperor was so much 
pleased at the sight that he pardoned 
him and gave him the lion, and An¬ 
droclus used to walk the streets lead¬ 
ing it around by a chain. 

In modern times also many lions 
have shown friendship for men. In 
1799, two lions in the Jar din des 
Plantes (Garden of Plants), Paris, 
became so fond of their keeper that 
when he was taken sick they show¬ 
ed the greatest sorrow, and when he 
got well and came back to them 
they rushed to meet him and roared 
with joy while licking his hands and 
face. A lioness in London would let 
her keeper ride on her back, and 
even drag her about by the tail. 
Theodorus, King of Abyssinia, who 
killed himself in 1868, when the 
British took his city of Magdala, 
used to keep several tame lions in 
his palace, where they were treated 
much like dogs. 

Lions sometimes show fondness, 


too, for other animals, especially 
when they are of use to them. An 
old lioness in the Dublin Zoological 
Gardens was taken sick, and during 
her illness was much troubled by 
rats, which she was not able to drive 
away. A terrier dog being put into 
her cage, she, not knowing that he 
could aid her, received him with a 
surly growl ; but when she saw him 
kill a rat, she coaxed the little dog 
to her, fondled him, and every night 
after that he slept beside her with 
her paws folded round him. 

Lions were much more numerous 
in ancient times than they are now, 
and were plentiful even in the north¬ 
ern parts of Greece. The Romans 
caught a great many, and used them 
in the games and fights in their am¬ 
phitheatres. It is said that Pompey 
and Caesar used up a thousand in this 
way in a short time. But lions have 
been unknown in Europe for many 
hundreds of years, and they are 
scarce in most parts of Asia, being 
found only in Arabia, Persia, and 
India. 

The lion is now much hunted in 
Africa, and there will soon be but 
few even there. Many go there to 
shoot them, just for the pleasure of it. 
The Arabs also kill a great many by 
digging a deep pit in the path where 
they have often seen a lion go. 
They cover the top over with a roof 
of branches and turf, and on this fix 
a bait, either a live lamb or a large 
piece of fresh meat. The lion 
springs on the bait as soon as it 
sees it, and falls into the pit. When 
one is caught in this way, the people 
of the village gather round the pit 
and worry it for a time and then 
shoot it. Sometimes two men lie 
in wait in trees and shoot the lion 
when it comes along. 

The lion is generally called the 
“ king of beasts,” and most hunters 
and travellers speak of it as a very 
savage and terrible animal ; but 
some say that it is to be feared only 
when very hungry, and that gener¬ 
ally it is afraid of man. Dr. Liv- 





LIQUORICE 


LITHOGRAPH 


361 


ingstone says that when the lion 
meets a man in daylight, it will stop 
one or two seconds to stare at him ; 
it will then turn slowly round, and 
walk off a few steps, looking over its 
shoulder ; then it begins to trot, and 
lastly bounds off like a hare as soon 
as it thinks it is no longer seen. He 
says also that the roar of the lion is 
much like the cry of the ostrich, but 
the lion roars only by night and the 
ostrich cries only by day. 

The lion is a MAMMAL of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the same family with 
the TIGER, LEOPARD, PANTHER, 
COUGUAR, LYNX, and common 
CAT. 

The word lion is from the Latin 
leo, Greek leon , lion. 

LIQUORICE, the root and juice 
of a plant which is raised mostly in 
the south of Europe. The roots are 
sometimes half an inch thick and a 
yard long. They are largely used 
by brewers in making porter. Black 
liquorice sticks or rolls are made in 
Spain and other parts of the south 
of Europe and sent to other coun¬ 
tries. They are made of liquorice 
juice boiled down and mixed with a 
little starch to keep them from melt¬ 
ing in warm weather. The sticks 
are rolled in bay leaves and packed 
in boxes. 

The word liquorice means sweet 
root, and is from the Latin glycyr- 
rhiza, which is from the Greek glu- 
kus, sweet, and riza, root. 

LITHOGRAPH, a picture printed 
from a drawing on stone. The stone 
used is a kind of limestone, found 
in Bavaria. It is made up chiefly of 
lime, clay, and silica (see SILICON), 
is usually of a pearl-gray color, and 
has a very fine grain. The stones 
are taken out of the quarry in large 
pieces, and afterward sawn up into 
slabs two or three inches thick and 
of any size wanted. The face of the 
slabs is then ground perfectly flat 
and polished smooth, when it is 
ready for the artist to draw on. 

The drawing can be made either 


with a crayon or with pen and ink. 
The crayons used are made mostly 
of tallow, wax, hard soap, and shell- 
LAC, colored with lamp-black ; and 
the ink is a little piece of crayon 
mixed with some water. The artist 
draws his picture on th$ stone just 
as he would on paper, sometimes 
using a crayon for broad lines, some¬ 
times a pen for fine lines, and some¬ 
times putting in shades with a brush 
dipped in the ink. When the draw¬ 
ing is done it can easily be washed 
off with a wet sponge ; but weak 
nitric acid is poured over it, the 
acid unites with the alkali in the 
soap of the crayon, and the rest of 
the crayon cannot then be washed 
off. The acid also eats into the 
stone a little in all the parts not cov¬ 
ered by the ink, and this leaves the 
lines of the drawing a little higher 
than the other parts. 

After the drawing has become 
dry, it is ready to be printed from. 
The stone is fastened on the bed of 
the press, and then wet with a 
sponge. The water wets all the 
clean parts of the stone, but not the 
parts drawn upon with the greasy 
crayon. The drawing is then inked 
with the common printer’s roller; 
the ink sticks to the greasy lines of 
the drawing, but not to the wet parts 
of the stone. A sheet of paper is 
now laid on the stone and the whole 
is passed under a heavy roller, Which 
presses all the ink on to the paper 
and thus prints the picture. The 
stone is then wet and inked again, 
and is ready for printing another 
picture. 

Sometimes the picture, instead of 
being drawn on the stone, is made 
on thin paper called transfer paper, 
which is coated on one side with a 
mixture of gum, starch, and alum. 
The drawing is thus made on the 
coating and not on the paper itself. 
The paper is then laid on the stone 
face downward and pressed, and the 
ink of the drawing sticks fast to the 
stone ; the back of the paper is next 
moistened with water, which loosens 





LITHOGRAPH 


362 


LIZARD 


the gum, and the paper may then be 
taken off, leaving the drawing stick¬ 
ing to the stone. The rest of the 
gum is now washed off the ink, and 
the stone can be printed from just 
as if the drawing had been made on 
the stone. Copper-plate maps are 
now mostly printed in this way, in¬ 
stead of from the plates themselves. 
A print is made from the copper 
plate on transfer paper, and then 
transferred to a stone. Maps print¬ 
ed in this way are just as good as 
those printed from the copper plate, 
and the copper plate, which costs 
much money to engrave, is saved 
from wearing, and many more maps 
can thus be made from it. 

Chromo * Lithographs are litho¬ 
graphs in which many colors are 
printed in one picture. Each color 
is printed from a separate stone, so 
that in printing a picture of many 
colors, twenty or thirty different 
stones are used. As each stone is 
made to fit its own part of the pic¬ 
ture, the drawing has to be made 
with the greatest care, for if one 
color should be printed the least bit 
out of its place on the paper the 
picture would be spoiled ; but one 
stone is often printed over the color 
made by other stones, so as to make 
various tints or shades of color. 

Oil paintings are often copied in 
this way so well that the copies 
might easily be mistaken for the 
paintings themselves by those who 
do not know oil paintings well. 
Maps are also colored in the same 
way, each color being printed sep¬ 
arately ; but electrotype (see Metal 
Work) plates are now mostly used 
instead of stones. Generally only 
three plates are used, one for blue, 
one for yellow, and one for red. 
Green can be made by printing yel¬ 
low over blue, orange by printing 
yellow over red, and purple by print¬ 
ing red over blue ; thus six colors 
can be printed from the three plates. 

Photo ■ Lithographs are pictures 
printed from stones on which the 
drawings have been made by the 


action of light, that is, by photogra¬ 
phy. There are many ways of do¬ 
ing this, but usually a photograph 
is taken on prepared paper and the 
picture then transferred to the stone 
in much the same way as a draw¬ 
ing. Engravings, maps, drawings, 
etc., may easily be copied in this 
way. The pictures in the New York 
Graphic are photo-lithographs. 

The word lithograph is from the 
Greek lithos , stone, and graphein , 
to write. 

Chromo-lithograph is made up of 
the Greek chromos, color, and litho¬ 
graph. 

Photo-lithograph is made up of 
the Greek phos, light, and litho¬ 
graph. 

LIZARD. These REPTILES are 
found in almost all countries, but 
are most plentiful in warm climates. 
Most of them are shaped much like 
crocodiles, and have four feet, but 
some have only two, and others have 
the feet so short and so covered up 
with skin that they look more like 
snakes. They vary in length from 
a few inches to several feet ; are of 
different colors, such as black, blue, 
green, yellow, red, brown, gray, or 
white ; and their skins are covered 
with small scales. They have small 
heads and thick necks, and some of 
them have long tongues, which they 
can dart out very quickly to catch 
insects. Some lizards live mostly 
in the water, some wholly on land, 
and some on trees. Land lizards are 
generally nearly of the color of the 
soil, tree lizards are bright color¬ 
ed, mostly green, and those which 
live among rocks are gray. Their 
food is chiefly insects, worms, eggs, 
small birds and mammals, and 
reptiles. They drink by lapping, 
like dogs and cats. Most of them 
lay eggs. Lizards’ tails are almost 
as brittle as glass, and will snap off 
at the lightest touch. A glove or 
handkerchief thrown upon one is 
enough to break it off, and it will lie 
wriggling while the animal runs 
away ; but a new one will soon grow 




LIZARD 


363 


LLAMA 


out. If the tail be cracked a little, 
instead of being broken off, a new 
tail will grow out of the crack, so 
that it sometimes happens that a liz¬ 
ard has a forked tail. 

The Iguanas of Central and South 
America are among the principal 
kinds of lizards. They are very large, 
with a tufted crest on the back, and 
a thick short tongue. The flesh of 
one kind is white, and is much liked 
for food in the countries where it 
lives. It grows nearly as long as a 
man, and spends its time mostly in 
trees, where it is caught with slip- 
nooses. 

The Monitors of Asia and Africa, 
some of which are longer than a 
man, are so called because they al¬ 


ways make a kind of whistling or 
hissing sound when a crocodile is 
coming, thus giving warning to all 
who are near. They eat many of 
the eggs and the young of croco¬ 
diles. 

The Frilled Lizard of Australia 
has on each side of the neck a wide 
fold of skin much like the ruff worn 
in Queen Elizabeth’s time. Another 
Australian lizard has its body cov¬ 
ered with pointed spikes. 

The Gecko of India has suckers 
on the ends of its fingers and toes, 
so that it can walk up walls and 
along ceilings like flies. 

The Chameleons are the most sin¬ 
gular of the lizards. They live 
chiefly in Africa, India, and other 



Head of Chameleon, with Tongue out. 


warm parts of the Old World, but 
are not found in the New World. 
They are ugly looking little animals, 
with a flat body and a sharp-ridged 
back. They move very slowly, 
taking hold of the branches of trees 
with their claws, and using their 
tail as monkeys do, to hold on to 
things with. It has been commonly 
said that the chameleon lives on air 
and changes its color to the color of 
the things around it; but the first 
story is not true, and the second one 
only partly true. People thought it 
lived on air because it has a way of 
blowing* itself up full of air, so that it 
looks very fat, and it moves its 
tongue so quickly in catching insects 
that it can scarcely be seen. This 


tongue is a long hollow tube with a 
thick fleshy end, which is always cov¬ 
ered with a sticky substance. The pic¬ 
ture shows the head, with the tongue 
run out, to catch an insect. The 
color of the chameleon’s skin changes 
often, but the change is made by the 
swelling and shrinking of the skin, 
and has nothing to do with the color 
of things on which the animal hap¬ 
pens to be. 

The word lizard is from the Latin 
lacerta y lizard. 

LLAMA, an animal somewhat like 
the camel, found only in South 
America. It is smaller than the 
camel, is more slender and grace¬ 
ful, and has no hump on the back, 
though it has a thick bed of fat under 








LOADSTONE 


364 


LOBSTER 


the skin. Its feet, too, differ from 
those of the camel, having two toes 
with strong nails fitted for climbing 
mountains instead of travelling over 
sandy deserts. The llama lives in 
flocks among the Andes, especially 
in the coldest parts, where snow lies 
all the year round, and feeds mostly 
on coarse grasses, mosses, lich¬ 
ens, and shrubs. When it has juicy 
food it does not need to drink water. 
It is very wild and shy, and keeps 
away from men. The young are 
sometimes caught with dogs and 
the lasso (see Horse), but the old 
ones have to be shot. The flesh and 
milk of the llama are eaten, the 
dung is used for fuel, the skin for 
making leather, and the hair for 
spinning and making into several 
kinds of cloth. The ancient Peru¬ 
vians tamed the llama and kept great 
numbers of them for beasts of bur¬ 
den, and it is still put to this use by 
the Indians of Peru and Chili, es¬ 
pecially for carrying goods across 
steep mountain roads where horses 
cannot go. The wild llama is called 
guanaco. The alpaca is a small 
kind of llama, much valued for its 
silky hair. 

The llama is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia , or cud-chewing 
animals, and of the camel family. 

The word llama is Peruvian. 

LOADSTONE. See Magnet. 

LOBSTER. There is but one 
kind of lobster in the United States, 
and it is different from that caught 
in Europe. It is found all along the 
Atlantic coast north of New York, 
from spring until autumn, when it 
goes off into deep water to pass 
the winter. Lobsters differ in size, 
weighing usually from two to fifteen 
pounds. They shed their shells every 
year, a new one growing out in place 
of the old one. While this is going 
on they hide away among the rocks 
to escape fishes which prey upon 
them. They often lose their large 
claws, and sometimes will cast one 
off when caught, but they soon 
grow out again. Their two large 


claws are fitted with teeth, but in 
one they are many and sharp and in 
the other few and blunt. With these 
they crush their food, which is 
chiefly clams, mussels, and other 
mollusks. Though the lobster has 
legs by which it crawls on the bot¬ 
tom, it moves chiefly in the water 
by means of its tail. By suddenly 
flapping this underneath its body, 
it is enabled to spring backward 
three or four times the length of a 
man with great swiftness. Its eye¬ 
sight is very sharp, and when it 
sees danger coming it will dart into 
its hole as quickly as a mouse. 

Lobsters lay eggs, but they remain 
hung in clusters, glued together with 
a kind of gum, to the hairy feet 
under the body of the mother, until 
they are hatched out. The young, 
which are nearly like the large ones, 
follow their mother around, hiding 
under her tail when they are fright¬ 
ened by anything. 

Lobsters are caught in long round 
traps called pots, which have a net¬ 
ting with a hole at each end, and are 
so made that the animal can go in, 
but cannot get out again. They are 
baited with dead fish or meat and 
sunk in deep water, their place being 
marked by a wooden float fastened 
by a rope to the pot. The pots are 
usually drawn up every day, the lob¬ 
sters taken out, and then set again 
to catch more. A small wooden 
plug is driven into the joint of the 
large claw of each lobster to keep it 
from biting, and all are then put into 
floating boxes called cars, until 
wanted for market. 

The shell of the lobster is dark 
green when the animal is alive, but 
it turns bright red when boiled. A 
French artist, who did not know 
this, once painted a lobster with a 
red shell swimming in the water. 

The lobster is a crustacean of 
the order decapoda , or ten-footed 
animals. 

The word lobster is from the 
Anglo-Saxon loppestre or lopustre, 
which is probably from the Latin 






LOCK 


365 


LOCK 


locust a, the old Roman name of the 
lobster. 

LOCK, a fastening for doors, 
drawers, boxes, etc., made to be 
opened and shut with a key. The 
chief parts of a lock are the bolt, 
or part which locks, and the staple, 
or part into which the bolt locks 
when turned by the key. ' The most 
common kind of locks are made with 
little round ridges of iron fastened 
to the back, as shown in the picture, 
Fig. 1, at B B. There is some¬ 
times a pin in the middle of these 
ridges for a hole in the end of the 
key, C, to fit on, and the key itself 
has some notches filed in it, so 
made that the ridges will pass 
through them when it is turned 
round. If it were not for these ridges 
and notches, which are called wards. 



B B 

Fig. 1.—Wards of Lock. 


any key of the same size would 
open the lock ; but a key which has 
no wards in it cannot get into 
the keyhole, because it will strike 
against the top of the ridges instead 
of fitting over them as the true key 
does. 

The Spring Lock, shown in the 
second picture, Fig. 2, was used 
everywhere before this century, and 
is still in common use in houses. In 
this A is the bolt, B B the iron 
ridges on the back, on which the 
wards of the key fit, and C is the 
key. The bolt has a slit, a, cut 
through the top of its back part, 
and the thin piece thus made is 
hardened into steel, so that it 
acts like a spring. Below are two 
notches, b b, with a round part, c , 
between them, and at d is a rounded 


hollow. When the key is put into 
the lock the wards are downward. 
It is then turned round until the end 
comes into the hollow d, as in the 
picture, Fig. 2, when the bolt is half 
locked. If it be turned a little more 



to the left, the bolt will move fur¬ 
ther along, and the right-hand notch 
b will fall into the edge of the rim 
of the lock and be held there by the 
spring a, which will press it down. 
The lock will then be fully locked. 
But if the key be turned a little to 
the right, instead of to the left, the 
bolt will move to the right until the 
left-hand notch b falls into the edge. 
The lock will then be unlocked. 

The Tumbler Lock is another kind, 
the most simple form of which is 
shown in the third picture, Fig. 3. 
In this it will be seen that the bolt 
A has no spring on its top and no 





— 



pi) 



Fig. 3.—Tumbler Lock. 


notches on the lower side excepting 
the rounded hollow in which the key 
turns. But it has two notches, f f, 
on the upper side, which are just 
as far apart as the bolt moves in 
locking and unlocking. Behind the 



























LOCK 


366 


LOCUST 


bolt, between it and the back part 
of the lock,* is a thin plate, B, called 
a tumbler, the covered parts of which 
are shown by the dotted line. This 
moves up and down on the little pin 
d, and has fastened to its other end 
a square pin, e, which falls into one 
or the other of the notches //, as 
the lock is locked or unlocked. At 
the back end of the key is cut a lit¬ 
tle notch, g, which raises the tum¬ 
bler when the key is turned so as to 
lift the pin e out of the notch in the 
bolt, and let it be moved along until 
the other notch comes under the 
pin, when the pin falls into it, and 
the bolt cannot then be moved until 
the key is turned backward again. 

The tumbler lock shown in the 
picture is the most simple kind, some 
locks being made with many tum¬ 
blers, and some with several sets of 
tumblers, one set of which is moved 
by the other. Some locks also are 
made so that the tumblers work 
differently each time the key is 
turned, and others have keys in 
which the wards may be changed 
each time they are used, the parts of 
the lock always fitting the key. But 
when a lock is locked with one of 
these changeable keys, it can be un¬ 
locked only with the key set in the 
same way in which it was locked. 
Such locks are put on to safes, bank 
vaults, and other places where valu¬ 
able things are kept. 

The Combination Lock is so called 
because it is locked and unlocked by 
means of different combinations of 
letters or figures—that is, letters or 
figures put together so as to make 
different words and numbers. These 
locks have no keys, but are locked 
by turning round a handle on the 
door, which moves a brass plate 
marked on the edge with the letters 
or figures. Suppose that the lock is 
a letter lock of four combinations, 
and that the word chosen is CATS. 
The door is closed, and the handle 
is then moved round until the letter 
C on the plate comes opposite a 
notch on the top. It is then turned 


again until the letter A comes under 
the notch, and so on with the other 
letters. The door will then be locked, 
and it can be unlocked .only by 
spelling the same word, which, of 
course, must be done backward. If 
the lock has figures instead of letters 
on the plate, a number instead of a 
word would be chosen, but it would 
be locked and unlocked on the same 
principle. The plot of a celebrated 
French novel turns on the unlocking 
of a safe through the discovery that 
the word by which it was locked was 
the name of the hero’s ladylove. 

The Time Lock, much used on 
bank vaults, goes by clock-work, 
and can be opened only at a certain 
time. When the banker closes the 
door, he winds up the clock and 
sets it at the hour of the next day 
when he wishes it to open. If this 
be nine o’clock, for instance, when 
the pointer reaches that hour the 
clock-work turns and opens the lock. 
No one, not even the one who locks 
it, can open the lock before the time 
at which it is set. A story is told of 
some burglars who took the cashier 
of a bank out of his bed at night, 
carried him to the bank, and told 
him to unlock the vault for them. 
The cashier told them that he could 
not do so, because the safe had a 
time lock on it. One of the burglars 
said : “ That won’t do. There was 
no time lock on it last Saturday.” 
” No,” replied the cashier, ” it was 
put on only last Tuesday.” “ Then 
we have lost our chance,” said the 
burglar sorrowfully, “ and we have 
been working for it for two months.” 

The word lock is from the Anglo- 
Saxon loc, a place shut in. 

LOCUST. This insect is some¬ 
thing like a grasshopper, but has 
shorter antennae or feelers and 
stouter legs. Its hind legs are es¬ 
pecially strong, enabling it to make 
great leaps, and its long wings give 
it the power of flying great distances. 
The males make a kind of scraping 
noise by rubbing their legs against 
the edges of their wing covers. The 






LOCUST 


367 


LOOM 


females dig holes in the ground and 
lay their eggs in them in the autumn, 
in little masses cemented together. 
The young locusts are hatched out 
in the spring, and like the young of 
grasshoppers, are wingless. 

Locusts live on the leaves and 
green stalks of plants, but after these 
are gone they will eat the bark of 
shrubs and trees. In Asia and in 
Africa they come in such numbers as 
to darken the air in their flight, and 
strip the earth of every green thing, 
eating the leaves from the trees and 
the grass down to the roots. They 
are frequently seen too in southern 
Europe and sometimes commit great 
ravages there. Locusts are eaten in 
the countries where they are plenty ; 
the wings and legs are pulled off and 
they are fried in oil or butter, or the 
bodies dried, ground into flour, and 
made into bread. Dried locusts are 
sold in the markets of Arabia, Syria, 
Egypt, and other eastern countries. 
In south Africa all kinds of birds 
and animals, even lions and ele¬ 
phants, feed on them. 

Locusts are also very destructive 
in the western United States, where 
they are commonly called grasshop¬ 
pers. They appear sometimes in im¬ 
mense numbers between the Missis¬ 
sippi River and the Rocky Moun¬ 
tains, settling down on the fields, and 
stripping them of their crops. 

The locust belongs to the order 
or t hop ter a , or straight-winged IN¬ 
SECTS. 

The word locust is from the Latin 
locusta, locust. 

LOCUST, a kind of tree which 
grew first in North America, but is 
now raised also in different parts of 
Europe. It grows very large in the 
south-western parts of the United 
States, and is much planted in places 
where trees are scarce. Its leaves 
are soft and velvety, and it bears 
clusters of white, sweet-smelling 
flowers. Its wood, which is yellow, 
is very valuable, and is used for rail¬ 
road ties, fence-posts, and in building 
certain parts of ships. 


The Honey Locust, found mostly 
in the Southern and South-western 
States and in parts of the Middle 
States, is also a large tree, but is not 
so valuable as the common locust, 
its wood being good for little but fire¬ 
wood. It bears small flowers, and 
long flat pods, full of brown seeds 
in a honey-like pulp. Its trunk and 
large limbs have on them long sharp 
thorns in branches. 

The locust tree is so called be¬ 
cause its branches look something 
like the legs of a flying locust. 

LOGWOOD, a dyewood obtained 
from the logwood tree, which grows 
in Central America, Mexico, and 
some of the West India islands. The 
tree, which is five or six times as tall 
as a man, is crooked and covered 
with thorns. The sapwood, or wood 
next to the bark, is yellow, but the 
heart wood is deep red. Only the 
red part is used. It is sent in short 
logs to foreign countries, where it is 
cut up into small chips and boiled in 
water to get out the dye. Logwood 
may be used, according to other 
things mixed with it, for dyeing 
bright and dark red, lilac, violet, 
purple, and black. 

Logwood is so called because it is 
sent to other countries in logs. 

LOOM, a machine on which a 
weaver makes cloth out of thread. 
To understand how the threads are 
woven together the article Cloth 
should be read first. The way in 
which the common hand loom is 
made is shown in the picture. In 
this, A A A A is a heavy frame 
which holds the parts of the loom to¬ 
gether. At each end is a roller, B, 
called the yarn beam, and C, the 
cloth beam. The threads of the 
warp are wound round the yarn 
beam, and kept tight by the weights 
W W ; only enough of each thread 
is left unrolled to reach to the cloth 
beam. But before they are carried 
to the cloth beam the warp threads 
are separated into two equal sets, 
each of which is passed through the 
loops of one of the healds. 




LOOM 


LOOM 


368 


The healds are two sets of strings, 
D and E, each of which is connected 
at top and bottom by rods. They 
are so hung by cords over pulleys 
and fastened at the bottom to the 
two treadles F G, that when one is 


pushed up the other comes down. 
In the middle of each one of the 
heald strings is a little loop, through 
which the warp threads are passed, 
one set of them being put through 
the loops of one heald and the other 



Hand Cloth-Loom. 


set through those of the other, so 
that when one heald goes up and the 
other down the warp threads are di¬ 
vided into two parts so as to leave 
an open space between them. This 
space is called the shed. After being 


put through the loops of the heald 
threads, the warp threads are next 
; passed through the teeth of a reed 
hung to a frame H, called the batten, 
which is made to swing backward 
and forward from the top of the 



Shuttle. 


loom frame. The reed is a narrow 
frame set with wires which are just 
far enough apart to let a thread of 
the warp pass between each. The 
warp threads are next fastened 
to the cloth beam, on which the 


cloth is wound up as fast as it is 
made. 

The weft thread, which is to be 
woven in with the warp to make 
cloth, is contained in a little instru' 
ment called a shuttle. The shuttle, 


































LOUSE 


369 


LUNGS 


which is shaped something like a 
boat, as will be seen by the picture, 
is usually about a foot long. In the 
middle is a little hollow or box, con¬ 
taining the bobbin, a , around 
which the weft thread is wound. 
The bobbin turns round on a wire 
so easily that the least strain will un¬ 
wind the thread, which is drawn out 
of the little hole b. 

In making cloth the weaver takes 
his seat at the cloth beam end of 
the loom. By pressing his foot on 
the treadle G the heald E is drawn 
down and the heald D up at the 
same time. This lifts the half of the 
warp threads which go through the 
loops of D and draws down the half 
through those of E, opening the 
shed. The weaver now throws his 
shuttle through the shed, and the 
weft thread, the end of which had 
first been fastened, unrolls from the 
bobbin and is passed through the 
warp. The batten is now swung up 
so as to drive the reed hard against 
the weft thread, and make it even 
and tight. The weaver next presses 
his other foot on the treadle F, 
which draws the heald D down and 
the heald E up. This crosses the 
threads of the two sets of warps, so 
as to shut in the weft thread, and 
opens a new shed. The shuttle is 
now thrown back the other way, by 
which another weft thread is put in. 
This is driven up by the reed close 
to the first, and the weaver goes on 
in this way, putting in one weft 
thread after another until his cloth 
is done. 

In some looms there are many 
more than two healds, and in steam 
looms there are other parts which 
affect the work, but the principle is 
always the same as in the hand 
loom. 

The word loom is from the Anglo- 
Saxon loma , household furniture. In 
old times the loom was a piece of 
furniture found in almost every 
house. 

LOUSE. There are many kinds 
of lice, some of which live on the 


body of man, and others on different 
birds and quadrupeds. The com¬ 
mon head louse, which sometimes 
gets into children’s hair and causes a 
great itching, is a small grayish-white 
insect. Each female lays about 
fifty little bean-shaped eggs, which 
are stuck to the hair by a kind of 
glue, and are usually called nits. 
After six days the nits hatch and 
after eighteen days more the young 
are full grown. The louse has a very 
sharp beak which it thrusts into the 
skin, and then sucks blood through 
a little tube which acts something 
like a pump. Fowls, dogs, cats, 
goats, and other animals all have 
different kinds of lice which live on 
them. 

The louse belongs to the order 
he?niptera , or half-winged INSECTS. 

The word louse is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon Ms, louse. 

LUNGS. In man the lungs lie 
in the chest, on each side of the 
heart, filling up nearly all the 
space which is not taken up by 
the heart. They are light, spongy 
bodies* full of little cells or holes 
which can be filled with air. Im¬ 
agine a thick short bush with 
many branches crowded with 
leaves, turned bottom upward ; 
imagine the trunk, the branches, 
and the twigs all hollow, and the 
leaves themselves to be little cells 
like hollow bladders, so that when 
you blow down the trunk, all the 
branches, twigs, and leaves will 
swell out, and when you stop blow¬ 
ing they will all shrink up again. 
Around this framework of hollow 
branches are wrapped arteries, veins, 
and capillaries, in such a way that 
each air cell or hollow bladder is 
covered closely with a fine network 
of capillaries, through which the 
blood passes. 

The following picture of the lungs 
shows on one side the framework of 
the right lung, with the arteries, 
veins, and capillaries cut away, and 
on the other the framework of the 
left lung covered with its arteries, 





LUNGS 


370 


LUNGS 


veins, and capillaries, just as it is in 
the body. When we breathe the air 
passes down through the wind-pipe 
b. This has two branches, d and c, 
through which the air goes to each 
lung, and passes through all the 
branches into the air-cells, around 
which the blood capillaries are 
wrapped. The skin of the air-cells 
is so very thin that the blood in 
the capillaries is separated from 
the air in the cells by a sheet so 
thin that gases can easily pass 
through it. The air which we 
breathe passes through the nose 



Lungs of Man. 


and mouth down the wind-pipe into 
the tubes of the lungs. On one side 
of these tubes is the air breathed in, 
and on the other is the blood. The 
oxygen from the air passes through 
this thin skin into the blood and unites 
with its CARBON, burning it up and 
forming CARBONIC ACID; which then 
passes through the thin skin into the 
lungs and is breathed out into the 
air. The blood with which the oxy¬ 
gen unites is the dark purple blood 
which comes from the lung artery. 
By taking in oxygen from the air 
and at the same time giving off car¬ 


bonic acid this dark venous blood is 
turned into bright scarlet blood, 
which passes by the lung veins into 
the heart, to be again forced through 
the body to give food to all its parts. 

With every breath air goes in and 
out of the lungs, but it is only a 
small quantity, for the lungs are not 
filled and emptied at each breath. 
The air breathed in goes only into 
the large branches of the wind-pipe, 
and does not go into the air cells at 
all. But they are all the time filled 
with air, which takes up the oxygen 
from the outer air and gives off car¬ 
bonic acid to it. The air breathed 
in is made up of twenty-one parts of 
oxygen and seventy-nine parts of 
NITROGEN, but that breathed out 
has in it only sixteen parts of oxy¬ 
gen, with five parts of carbonic acid 
and seventy-nine parts of nitrogen. 
So it will be seen that the nitrogen 
does not change at all; just as much 
of that is breathed out as was 
breathed in ; but five parts of the 
oxygen have been exchanged for as 
many parts of carbonic acid. The 
oxygen has gone into the blood, and 
the carbonic acid has come out of 
the blood ; thus the air breathed 
into the lungs gives the blood the 
oxygen which it. needs and takes 
from it the carbon which it does not 
need, changing the impure venous 
blood into pure arterial blood. 

No being can live and be healthy 
without pure air, that is, air with 
plenty of oxygen in it, because it is 
needed all the time to keep the blood 
pure. If we are cut off from the 
air a little while, we die, because the 
blood gets so clogged up that it can¬ 
not do its work rightly. Babies have 
sometimes been smothered by moth¬ 
ers or nurses who did not know, 
or did not think of this. A mother 
who had to go on a long sleigh-ride 
once in very cold weather, wrapped 
her baby up so closely in shawls and 
furs that it could not get any fresh 
air to breathe ; and when it was un¬ 
rolled at the end of the journey the 
poor little thing was found to be 







LUNGS 


37i 


LYNX 


dead. Beys ought to be very care¬ 
ful how they heap hay upon each 
other in play, as a child has been 
known to be smothered in this way. 
It is very dangerous too to shut a 
child up in a trunk or chest, as is 
sometimes done in play. There was 
once a beautiful Italian lady named 
Ginevra, who, on her bridal day, 
playfully hid away from her husband 
in an oak chest in a garret. The lid 
closed with a spring lock, and as no 
one knew where she was, she soon 
smothered to death. She was looked 
for everywhere, but she could not 
be found. At last, more than fifty 
years afterward the chest was opened 
and a skeleton was found in it, and 
on it were the jewels which she 
wore that night. Her sad story is 
told in verse by the poet Rogers. 

But the most dreadful story of 
death from the want of air is that of 
the Black Hole of Calcutta, in which 
one hundred and twenty-three Brit¬ 
ish prisoners were suffocated. The 
Black Hole is a small dungeon in 
Fort William, Calcutta. In 1756 
Surajah Dowlah, the Indian ruler of 
Bengal, took the city, and put its 
garrison of one hundred and forty- 
six men into this dungeon, which 
had only two small windows on one 
side, covered with iron bars. The 
prisoners suffered terribly during the 
night, for there was not air enough 
for them to breathe, and in the morn¬ 
ing only twenty-three of them were 
found alive. They could not get 
oxygen enough, and as their lungs 
were all the time giving out carbonic 
acid, the air in the dungeon was 
soon loaded with that poisonous 
gas. 

Every person needs about three 
hundred and fifty cubic feet of air 
every twenty-four hours. This would 
fill more than two thousand two 
hundred and fifty gallon measures. 
Out of this air he takes into his 
blood through his lungs an amount 


of oxygen equal to more than four 
times the size of his own body, and 
breathes out nearly as much car¬ 
bonic acid. So the air which we 
breathe must not only be plentiful ; 
it must also be of the right kind. It 
must have in it enough oxygen, or 
men cannot live ; and it must be 
freed from the carbonic acid which 
men breathe out themselves, or it will 
kill them. From this we see how 
necessary it is that all rooms should 
be well ventilated. 

The word lung is from the Anglo- 
Saxon lunge , plural lungen , lung. 

LYNX. The animal commonly 
called the wild cat in the United 
States is really the bay lynx, so 
called on account of the color of its 
fur, which is bay or reddish-brown 
in winter, and ashy-brown in sum¬ 
mer. It looks much like a very 
large cat, but has a shorter tail than 
the common cat. It lives on smaller 
animals, such as hares and rabbits, 
but sometimes prowls around farms 
and carries off young pigs and poul¬ 
try. Lynxes are frequently caught in 
traps in the Middle States and in 
New England, and in the winter 
time their cries are often heard in 
the woods. It is a cowardly animal 
and will not attack a man unless 
closely pressed or cornered, when it 
will scratch terribly. 

The Canada Lynx is a little larger 
than the wild cat, being about the 
size of a setter dog, and is gray 
above and light gray below. It lives 
in the deep woods of Canada, and 
seldom comes into the United States. 
The Indians hunt it for its fur, 
which is prized for robes, muffs, 
and collars. 

The lynx is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the cat family, which 
includes also the LION, tiger, 
JAGUAR, COUGUAR, PANTHER, and 
common cat. 

The word lynx is Latin. 





M 


MACARONI, a kind of food made 
of a paste or dough of wheat flour 
formed into pipes or tubes. Only 
the hardest kinds of wheat, which 
have in them the most GLUTEN, are 
used in making macaroni. The 
wheat is ground into a coarse meal, 
in which state it is called semola. 
The semola is made into a stiff 
dough by means of machinery, 
though sometimes in Italy it is trod¬ 
den out by the feet, and is then 
forced through holes in the bottom 
of a cast iron barrel something like a 
cullender. The barrel is filled with 
dough and a plate of iron which just 
fits into it is pushed down by a pow¬ 
erful press. The paste is thus 
forced through the bottom, and 
takes the shape of the holes. For 
making macaroni the holes are of 
the size of the tube to be made, and 
have a core, called a mandrel, in the 
middle, which is fastened on one 
side, as shown in the 
picture. The dough 
comes out of the bot¬ 
tom of the cylinder 
shaped like a tube, 
but split open on one 
side by the little piece 
Hole for m a king w hj c h holds the core 
Macaroni. i 1 • 

or mandrel in its 

place. Before it goes far, however, 
the two edges of the paste, which 
are damp, come together and stick, 
thus forming a tube. A fire under 
the cylinder partly bakes the maca¬ 
roni as it passes through, and it is 
afterward dried by being hung 
up on rods. Macaroni is some¬ 
times made into flat ribbons or 



fillets by being forced through flat 
holes. 

Vermicelli is made in the same 
way as macaroni, only the dough is 
a little thicker and is forced through 
small round holes without any core 
in them. When about a foot long 
the pieces are broken off and twisted 
into different shapes. Sometimes 
the dough is rolled into thin sheets 
and stamped out into little stars, 
rings, letters, figures, and other 
forms. In this state they are called 
“ Italian paste,” and are used in 
making soups. 

Macaroni and vermicelli are made 
chiefly in Italy, whence they are sent 
in large quantities to foreign coun¬ 
tries. Macaroni is eaten generally 
cooked with cheese, but is also, 
with vermicelli, used for thickening 
soups, and for making puddings. 

The word macaroni is in Italian 
maccheroni , which is from maccare, 
to bruise or crush. 

Vermicelli is Italian, and means 
little worms. It is from the Latin 
vermes , a worm. 

MACE. See Nutmeg. 

MACKEREL, a common sea fish, 
much used for food. Mackerel are 
found in all northern seas. They 
come to the coasts in spring and 
summer to spawn, and return into 
the deep parts of the ocean at the 
beginning of winter. The common 
mackerel of our coast differs some¬ 
what from the European mackerel, 
but its habits are much the same. 
What is called here the Spanish 
mackerel is also slightly different 
from the Spanish mackerel of 


372 








MADDER 


373 


MAGNET 


Europe. Mackerel live chiefly on 
the young of other fishes, and are 
themselves eaten by the horse 
mackerel or tunny, the blue fish, 
and other large fishes. 

The mackerel fishery is very im¬ 
portant, and great numbers of these 
fish are caught yearly both with 
hook and line and with nets. They 
swim in shoals or schools just under 
the surface of the water, their fins 
often showing above it. They are 
taken mostly in seines (see Net), 
which are drawn up alongside a 
boat, and the fish are then scooped 
out with a dip net. Seines can be 
used only in calm weather ; when 
the wind is high mackerel are 
caught with hook and line. The 
hooks are usually baited with small 
pieces of mackerel skin, but mackerel 
will bite at a piece of white or red 
cloth, or almost anything which can 
easily be seen in the water. 

The mackerel is supposed by 
some to be named from the spots on 
its sides, macula in Latin meaning a 
spot. 

MADDER, one of the most useful 
of all dyes, obtained from the roots of 
the madder plant, which grows in 
the warm parts of both the Old and 
the New World. The roots are 
dried in stoves or in the sun, threshed 
to get off the loose skin, and then 
broken up into pieces or ground fine, 
and the meal sifted to different de¬ 
grees of fineness. Madder is used 
by dyers to make a great vraiety of 
colors, especially red tints, and ,oth¬ 
ers called madder purple, madder 
orange, madder yellow, etc. The 
well-known Turkey red, used in 
dyeing cotton goods, is a madder 
color. 

The word madder is from the 
Anglo-Saxon maddere , the madder 
plant. 

MAGNESIUM, a metal, and one 
of the principal elements. It is 
never found free, that is, alone by 
itself, but can be made by the chem¬ 
ist, and when pure is a soft, silver- 
white metal, which can be hammered 


out or made into wire. It does not 
change in dry air, but in moist air 
soon oxidizes or rusts. When 
heated very hot it will take fire and 
burn with a dazzling bluish-white 
light. Thin narrow ribbons of it are 
burned where much light is wanted. 
Photographers use it to light up 
caves and other dark places where 
sunlight cannot enter. It is also 
used for making signals and in fire¬ 
works. When burned, magnesium 
unites with OXYGEN and leaves a 
white powder, which has neither taste 
nor smell. This is magnesia (magne¬ 
sium oxide). It will not melt in any 
common fire, and is therefore used 
for making crucibles for chemists. 
Magnesia united with sulphuric acid 
makes magnesium sulphate, com¬ 
monly known as Epsom salts, be¬ 
cause found in a mineral spring at 
Epsom, England. 

MAGNET, a substance which has 
the power of attracting or drawing 
iron to itself. The loadstone, or 
natural magnet, is a kind of iron 
ore found in different parts of the 
world, especially in Sweden, and in 
the States of New York and New 
Jersey. If a loadstone be held near 
to iron filings they will cling to it in 
a cluster. Many needles may be 
raised up by it, and even tacks and 
small nails ; and if the loadstone be 
a large one it will hold up quite a 
heavy weight. This power which 
the loadstone has of attracting iron 
is called magnetism. 

The loadstone can give this power 
to pieces of iron and steel, so that 
they also will attract iron. This is 
done by rubbing the loadstone sev¬ 
eral times along a piece of iron or 
steel, when the iron or steel will be¬ 
come a magnet and have the same 
power which the loadstone has. A 
bar of iron or steel to which magnet¬ 
ism has thus been given is called an 
artificial magnet. Common iron will 
not keep this power long, but steel 
will. Magnets are made in different 
forms, but the most common ones 
are the straight bar magnet and the 






MAGNET 


374 


MAGNET 


horseshoe magnet. Bar magnets 
are often made by putting several 
thin bars together in a bundle. 
Such a one is much stronger than a 
single bar of the same size, because 
thin bars can be more strongly and 
evenly magnetized than thick ones. 
Horseshoe magnets, which are so 
called because they are made in the 
shape of a horseshoe, are also made 
stronger by putting several thin ones 
together, 

The power which magnets have is 
not equally strong in all parts of 
their surface. If a bar 
magnet be rolled in iron 
filings, the filings will col¬ 
lect mostly about the two 
ends, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture, while in the middle 
there will be a place where 
there will be none. The 
two ends of the magnet, 
where the magnetic power 
is strongest, are called the 
poles. These poles differ 
from each other, as will be 
seen if the magnet be held 
up on a sharp point so that 
it may easily turn in any 
direction, like the needle in 
the compass. It will then 
move round in a line nearly 
ri Bar north and south, one end 
Magnet, always pointing toward the 
north and the other end to¬ 
ward the south. For this reason the 
pole of the magnet which points 
north is called the north pole, and 
the one which points south the south 
pole. If the magnet be turned round 
so that the north pole point toward 
the south, it will soon turn back and 
point toward the north again. This 
is because the earth itself is a great 
magnet, having one pole at its north 
end, which draws the north pole of 
the magnet in that way. The power 
of the magnet to turn toward the 
north is not changed by shutting it 
up in glass, paper, wood, copper, 
or anything which has no iron in it. 
Thus, the COMPASS works just the 
same when shut up tight in a brass 


box with a glass over it as if it were 
in the open air. 

If a magnet be cut in two in the 
middle two magnets will be made, 
each of which will have a north and 
a south pole. If these be again di¬ 
vided, other magnets will be formed, 
each having a north and a south 
pole, and so on, no matter how 
many parts it may be divided into. 
If now one of these magnets be 
placed so that it will turn round on 
a point, like the compass needle, and 
the poles of another magnet be 
brought near to one of its poles,it will 
be found that the north pole of one 
magnet will attract or draw toward 
it the south pole of the other one, but 
will repel or drive away its north pole, 
and that the south pole of the first 
one will attract the north pole of the 
second one, but will repel its south 
pole. Thus poles of the same kind 
repel, while poles of different kinds 
attract each other. But either pole 
of a magnet will attract a piece of 
iron which is not magnetic ; and the 
strongest attraction takes place when 
both the poles of one magnet can be 
put on the surface of the piece of 



iron. This can be done with the 
horseshoe magnet, as shown in the 
picture, where S and N are the south 
and north poles. Such a magnet is 
the best kind, either for raising 









MAGNET 


375 


MAGNET 


weights or for making other mag¬ 
nets. A magnet does not lose any 
of its power by giving magnetism to 
other bodies, but gains power and 
becomes stronger. But they do lose 
power if left alone by themselves any 
length of time. They are therefore 
usually fitted with apiece of soft iron 
called an armature 
(from Latin armatura , 
armor), shown at A in 
Fig. 2, with a hook 
below it to hang a 
small weight on. If 
the weight be added 
to a little each day the 
magnet will slowly 
grow stronger. This 
is because the arma¬ 
ture itself is turned in¬ 
to a magnet, with its 
north pole next to the 
south pole of the horse¬ 
shoe magnet, and the 
two, acting on each 
other, add to each 
other’s strength. 

/Ill 11!H1\ Electro • Magnets. 

Magnets may be made 
Fig- 3- by ELECTRICITY. If 
Helix and Bar. a ne edle of hard steel 
be laid across a wire 
through which a current of elec¬ 
tricity is passing, such as the wire of 
a Voltaic battery, the needle will at 
once become magnetic, one end be¬ 
ing a north pole and the other a 
south pole. A piece of soft iron laid 
across a like wire will also become 
magnetic, but will remain so only a 
short time, while the steel needle 
will stay so always. The magnet 
will be made much stronger if the 
wire be coiled around the iron or 
steel, as shown in the picture, Fig. 
3, at A. Such a coil is called a helix 
(Greek, a winding). To keep the 
coils of wire from touching each 
other when thus wound, the wire 
should be covered with silk thread. 
If the soft iron bar, B, be put loosely 
inside a helix, and the two ends of 
the wire, a and b , be connected with 
a Voltaic battery, the iron bar will 



become so strongly magnetized that 
it will be held up, and it will also 
hold up a weight hung to it ; but as 
soon as the current of electricity 
ceases, the magnetism ceases and 
the bar and weight will drop. Tem¬ 
porary magnets thus made by an 
electric current are called electro¬ 
magnets. 

The strongest electro-magnets are 
made by bending a piece of soft iron 
into the shape of a horseshoe, as 
shown in the picture, Fig. 4, and then 
winding round it a copper wire cov¬ 
ered with silk thread. If now the two 
poles of a Voltaic battery (see Elec¬ 
tricity) be joined with the ends of 
the wires, A and B, one pole being 
joined to A and the other to B, so 
that the electrical current will pass 
through the wire coiled round the 
horseshoe iron, the iron will at once 
become very strongly magnetic, so 
much so that it will hold up the arm¬ 
ature C, and a heavy weight fastened 
to it. Electro-magnets have been 
made so strong that they could hold 
up a weight of two tons, or as much 
as two common loads of coal. But 
as soon as the connection between 



Fig. 4.—Horseshoe Electro-Magnet. 

the horseshoe and the Voltaic bat¬ 
tery be broken, so that the current 
through the coiled wire shall cease, 
the power of the magnet will be lost 
and the weight which it held up will 
at once drop. 












MAGNOLIA 


376 


MAMMALS 


If a piece of hard steel, instead of 
soft iron, be wound with a helix of 
wire, and an electric current be al¬ 
lowed to flow through the wire, the 
steel will not only be magnetized, 
but will stay a magnet even after the 
current ceases. It will then be just 
like any other magnet, and will draw 
iron to itself. As this magnet was 
made by electricity, so it may be 
used to excite or make electricity. 
If we wind a wire round a magnet, 
and join the two ends of the wire to¬ 
gether, we may make a current of 
electricity run through the wire by 
touching the end of the magnet with 
a piece of soft iron, or even by bring¬ 
ing the iron near the end. The 
reason of this is, that the iron dis¬ 
turbs the magnetism in the magnet, 
and any change in the condition or 
state of a magnet will produce elec¬ 
tricity in a wire wound round it. 
This current, which is called a mag¬ 
neto-electric current, because it is 
caused by a magnet, will flow 
through the wire every time that the 
iron is brought near to and taken 
away from the magnet. The mag¬ 
neto-electric current has lately been 
made very useful to mankind, as is 
told about under Telephone. 

The word magnet is from the Latin 
and Greek magnes, loadstone, which 
was named from Magnesia, in an¬ 
cient Thessaly, where loadstones or 
natural magnets were first found. 

MAGNOLIA. Most of the shrubs 
and trees called magnolia belong to 
North America, though some are 
found in India, China, and Japan. 
The principal kinds in the United 
States are the laurel magnolia or 
sweet bay, which grows in nearly all 
the States ; the great-leaved mag¬ 
nolia, which grows south of Ken¬ 
tucky ; and the great-flowered mag¬ 
nolia, which grows from North Car¬ 
olina southward. The last is an 
evergreen, and is the most beautiful 
of all the magnolias. The flowers 
are large, pure white, and very sweet. 

The magnolia was named after 
Pierre Magnol, professor of botany 


at Montpellier, France, in the seven¬ 
teenth century. 

MAGPIE, a black and white bird 
of the crow kind, but with a much 
longer tail than the crow. It is com¬ 
mon in Europe and in the north 
parts of America, but is not often 
seen near the Atlantic coast of the 
United States. The magpie is noted 
for its cunning, is easily tamed, and 
may be taught to speak a few words. 
It is a bold, impudent bird, and will 
attack a dog, a fox, or any small bird 
of prey without fear. It chatters all 
the time, from which comes the say¬ 
ing— to “chatter like a magpie.” 
Magpies build their nest in the top 
of a high tree, and lay usually seven 
eggs, of which they take the greatest 
care, both the male and the female 
taking turns at sitting. 

The magpie belongs to the order 
insessores , or perching BIRDS. 

The word magpie is made up of 
mag , a short form for Margaret, and 
pie, Latin pica, the magpie. 

MAHOGANY, the wood of a tree 
of the same name which grows in 
South and Central America and the 
West India islands. The tree is 
very large, being often five feet 
thick. The wood is hard, close- 
grained, quite heavy, and of a rich 
reddish-brown color, usually with 
beautiful lines or veins. It is much 
used for furniture, and for the inside 
woodwork of railway cars, some¬ 
times solid, but more often as a 
veneer, or thin layer to be glued on 
to cheaper wood. Mahogany differs 
in value according to the color and 
beauty of its veins. Sometimes 
single logs have been sold for more 
than $5000. 

The word mahogany is from ma- 
hagoni, the West Indian name of 
the tree. 

MAMMALS, the first or highest 
class of vertebrate ANIMALS, so 
called because they all suckle their 
young at the breast. Mammals, like 
birds, are warm-blooded, but they 
differ from them in being viviparous 
—that is, they bring forth their 




MAMMALS 


377 


MAMMALS 


young alive, while birds hatch theirs 
from eggs. They are also generally 
covered with hair, and never with 
feathers; but some have a bare skin, 
as the whale and porpoise ; some, 
wool, as the sheep ; some, bony 
scales or plates, as the ant-eater and 
armadillo ; and some, quills or bris¬ 
tles, as the porcupine and hedgehog. 

Mammals are alike in having the 
body divided into the three parts 
of head, neck, and trunk. This 
cannot always be seen in live 
mammals, but it can in their skele¬ 
tons ; and the neck, although it 
differs in length from that of man to 
that of the giraffe, is, with only two 
or three exceptions, made up of sev¬ 
en vertebrae or joints. Mammals 
breathe by means of lungs, and 
never, like fishes, through gills. 
They differ too from fishes in having 
a double heart, that is, a heart divided 
into two parts. Most mammals are 
quadrupeds (four-footed, from Latin 
quatuor , four, and pes, plural pedes, 
foot), but in man hands take the 
place of the fore feet, while in whales, 
seals, etc., the feet are paddles. 
Their teeth differ according to the 
food they eat, some being made for 
cutting, some for grinding, and others 
for holding the food while the ani¬ 
mal tears it apart. Most mammals 
have two sets of teeth, the first set 
coming out and being replaced by a 
second one, but some never have 
but one set. Mammals do not 
change their homes with the sea¬ 
sons, as most birds do, but spend 
the summer and winter in the same 
place. Whales are exceptions : they 
live during the summer in the cold 
Arctic regions and come south every 
winter into the warmer waters of the 
Atlantic. 

Mammals have been divided in 
different ways by different writers, 
but the following is the most simple 
arrangement, the class being divided 
into nine orders : 

I. Bimana, or two-handed ani¬ 
mals. Man is the only one in this 
class. 


The word bimana is from the Lat¬ 
in bis, twice, and mantes , hand. 

II. Quadrumana, or four-handed 
animals, in which are the APES, 
baboons, and monkeys. They 
are so called because they use all 
their feet like hands. Some writers 
name this order pedimatia , or foot¬ 
handed animals. 

The word quadrumana is from the 
Latin quatuor , four, and manus, 
hand. Pedimana is from the Latin 
pes , foot, and manus, hand. 

III. Cheiroptera, or hand-winged 
animals, made up of the bats. 
They are so called because the bones 
of the wings are like those in the 
hand of man, though much longer. 
These are the only mammals which 
can really fly, other flying animals, 
such as the FLYING SQUIRREL, hav¬ 
ing no power to fly upward, but be¬ 
ing able only to make long leaps 
from tree to tree. 

The word cheiroptera is from the 
Greek cheir, hand, and pteron, 
wing. 

IV. Carnivora, or flesh - eating 
animals, so called because they live 
mostly on flesh food. 

The word carnivora is from the 
Latin carnis, flesh, and vorare, to 
devour. 

The carnivora are divided into five 
families : 



Skull of Cat. 


i. Cats, including the lion, ti¬ 
ger, LEOPARD, PANTHER, COU- 
guar, lynx, common CAT, and 
others. These animals have soft 
cushion-like feet, so that they can get 
near their prey without being heard, 
and short strong legs, fitted for leap- 





MAMMALS 


378 


MAMMALS 


ing. They all have sharp claws, 
which are shut up when they walk, 
but which they can thrust out when 
they wish to use them. Their senses 
are sharp, and they can see almost as 
well by night as by day. Their teeth 
are made for cutting and tearing 
flesh, and in their wild state they 
never eat anything else. In the pic¬ 
ture, which shows the skull of the 
common house cat, may be seen the 
way the teeth are set in all the cat 
family. 

2. Dogs, among which are the 
WOLF, JACKAL, FOX, and common 
DOG. They are not entirely flesh- 
eating animals, like the cats, but are 
fitted to eat vegetables also. 

3. Weasels, among which are the 
WEASEL, ERMINE, SABLE, MARTEN, 


FERRET, POLECAT, MINK, SKUNK, 
and otter. These mammals have 
long, slender bodies, all being much 
like the weasel, shown in the pic¬ 
ture, and live in the hollows of trees, 
holes in walls, or in burrows in the 
ground, from which they come forth 
at night in search of game. They 
are very bloodthirsty, and most of 
them have a strong smell. The furs 
of some of them are very valuable. 
The otters differ some from other 
weasels, as they always live near the 
water and feed chiefly on fish. 

4. Bears, including the BEAR* 
badger, RACCOON, and others. 
Bears are called plantigrade ani¬ 
mals, because they always walk flat- 
footed, that is, on the sole of the 
foot. In this they differ from the 



Weasel. 


families of the cats, the dogs, and 
the weasels, which always walk on 
the toes, and are therefore called 
digitigrade animals. All the bears 
have five toes, and claws, but the 
claws are made for climbing trees and 


Hind Foot. Fore Foot. 

Feet of Bear. 

for digging in the ground, and cannot 
be shut up like those of the cats. 
They are not altogether flesh-eaters, 
but often eat vegetables. 

The word plantigrade is from the 
Latin planta , the sole of the foot, 


and gradi, to walk. Digitigrade is 
from the Latin digitus , toe, and 
gradi , to walk. 

5. Seals. The seals are said to 
be amphibious, that is, living a 
double life, because they live both 
on land and in water. They feed 
chiefly on fishes, but will eat flesh if 
they can get it. 

The word amphibious is from the 
Greek amfthi , on both sides, and 
bios, life. 

V. Insectivora, or insect-eating 
animals, such as moles and hedge¬ 
hogs. 

The word insectivora is from the 
Latin insectum , an insect, and 
vorare, to devour. 

VI. Rodentia, or gnawing ani¬ 
mals, so named because their teeth 








MAMMALS 


379 


MAMMALS 


are fitted for gnawing wood, the 
shells of nuts, and other like hard 
things. The gnawing teeth are in 
front, two in the upper and two in 
the lower jaw. These, unlike the 
teeth in other mammals, are always 
growing, but are kept of the right 
length by the gnawing of the ani¬ 
mal, which wears them down. If 
by any chance the animal loses one 
of these, the tooth opposite it keeps 
on growing, and sometimes reaches 
such a length as to prevent its eating. 
Rats and squirrels have been known 
to die from this cause. 

The word rodentia is from the 
Latin rodere , to gnaw. 

The rodentia are divided into eight 
families : 

1. Squirrels, among which are the 
common SQUIRREL, ground squir¬ 
rel or chipmunk, and flying 
SQUIRREL. They all have thick 
bushy tails. 

2. Marmots, among which are the 
ground hog or woodchuck. 

3. Rats and mice, among which 
are the black and the brown rat, 
the muskrat, and the house and 
the field MOUSE. 

4. Beavers, which have webbed 
hind feet and a broad flat tail. 

5. Porcupines, which are cov¬ 
ered with an armor of sharp spines. 

6. Guinea pigs, which look 
something like a rabbit. 

7. Chinchillas, small South 
American mammals valued for their 
fur. 

8. Hares, including rabbits. 
They differ from other rodents in 
having more than four front teeth. 

VII. Edentata, or toothless ani¬ 
mals, such as the sloth and ant- 
eater. The sloth climbs trees with 
its back downward and sleeps hang¬ 
ing from the branches. It is found 
only in South America. The ant- 
eater, which also lives in South 
America, tears open ant hills with 
its claws, and licks out the ants with 
its long tongue. 

The word edentata is from the 
Latin e, without, and dens, a tooth. 


VIII. Marsupialia, marsupials, or 
pouched animals, named from a 
kind of bag or pouch which the 
females have, and in which they 
carry their young for some time after 
birth. Among them are the kan¬ 
garoos, which are found only in 
Australia and neighboring islands, 
and the opossums, which live only 
in America. 

The word marsupialia is from the 
Latin marsupiujn, a pouch. 

IX. Pachydermata, pachyderms, 
or thick-skinned animals, so named 
from the thickness of their skins. 

The word pachydermata is from 
the Greek flachus, thick, and derma , 
skin. 

The pachydermata are divided in¬ 
to six families : 

1. Elephants, which are the only 
mammals having a long proboscis or 
trunk. 

2. Tapirs, which have a long up¬ 
per lip something like the elephant’s 
trunk, but much shorter. They 
grasp branches of trees and herbage 
with it. Tapirs are found in South 
America and in the Malayan islands. 

3. Hogs, including the common 
HOG and the wild boar. 

4. The RHINOCEROS, so called 
because it has a large horn growing 
out of the end of the nose. It is used 
for defence and for rooting up bushes 
and small trees on the leaves or fruit 
of which it feeds. One kind has a 
second smaller horn between this 
one and the forehead. 

The word rhinoceros means nose- 
horn, and is from the Greek rin , 
nose, and keras , horn. 

5. The hippopotamus, which is 
found only in Africa. 

The word hippopotamus means 
river-horse, and is from the Greek 
hippos, horse, and potamos, river. 

6. Horses, including the common 
horse, the ASS, and the zebra. 
This family differs from all other 
mammals in having solid hoofs. 

X. Ruminantia, ruminants, or cud- 
chewing animals, so called because 
they raise their food from the stom- 




MAMMALS 


380 


MAN 


ach and chew it. The stomach of 
ruminants has four separate parts or 
bags, as shown in the picture, which 
is the stomach of a sheep. Their 
food, which is chiefly grass and herb¬ 
age, is not chewed at once, but is 
swallowed through the gullet, a , into 
the first and largest stomach, d , 
called the paunch, where it soaks for 
a while, and then passes into the 
second stomach, c, called the honey¬ 
comb bag, because its inside is a 



Stomach of Sheep. 


network of little cells like a honey¬ 
comb. In this the food is made up 
into cuds or wads, and when the 
animal is at leisure it brings up 
each of these, one at a time, chews 
it, and swallows it again. It goes 
this time into the third stomach, b , 
called the manyplies, because it has 
many folds, and thence into the 
fourth stomach, e, called the rennet, 
which is properly the true stom¬ 
ach. From this it passes off through 
the intestine f. Most ruminants 
have horns, and the feet of all end 
in two toes with hoofs. 

The word ruminantia is from the 
Latin rumtnare , to chew over again. 

The ruminantia are divided into 
seven families : 

1. Bovidae, among which are the 
ox (see Cattle), the buffalo of 
Asia and Africa, the American 
bison, miscalled buffalo, the musk 
ox, and others. All of this fami¬ 
ly have tapering horns, without 
branches. 


The word bovidae is from the 
Latin bos, an ox. 

2. Sheep, of which there are 
many kinds. 

3. Goats, including the common, 
the Angora, and the Cashmere goat, 
the ibex, and others. 

4. Deer, among which are the 
common deer, the reindeer, the 
elk, and others. They all have 
branching horns, which are shed 
usually every year. 

5. Musk deer, which look like 
deer, but are smaller, and have no 
horns. The perfume MUSK is ob¬ 
tained from one of this family. 

6 . Antelopes, of which there 
are many kinds, including the gazelle 
and the chamois. They look like 
the deer, but they do not shed their 
horns. 

7. Camels, including the true 
camel, the dromedary, and the 
LLAMA. 

8 . Giraffe or camelopard, which 
is found only in Africa. 

XI. Cetacea, among which are 
the true whales, baleen and sperm 
whales, and the dolphins (dolphin, 
porpoise, grampus, and narwhal). 

The word cetacea is from the 
Latin cetus, a whale. 

The word mammal is from the 
Latin mamma, breast. 

MAN, the first and principal order 
of mammals, which form the first 
class of vertebrate animals. Man is 
put at the head of the animal king¬ 
dom because he is the superior of 
all animals. He is the only animal 
which always walks erect, the only 
one which may truly be said to have 
a hand, and the only one which 
talks. It is true that monkeys can 
stand erect, or nearly so, and that 
they use their forefeet sometimes 
like hands ; but they usually walk 
on all fours, and their hands are 
fitted for only a few motions, while 
those of man are adapted to almost 
every kind of movement. Parrots, 
too, and some other birds, can be 
taught to speak, but their words are 
only imitations of those of man, and 







MAN 


38i 


MAN 


they cannot make language. In 
some things man is inferior to other 
animals : he cannot swim as well as 
fishes can, he cannot fly like birds, 
he cannot run, nor jump, nor climb 
as well as many quadrupeds and in¬ 
sects ; but he can do a greater num¬ 
ber of things than any other ani¬ 
mal. It is not, however, in his body 
that man chiefly excels all other 
animals, but in his mind, which 
enables him to reason and to use his 
limbs and his faculties. The mind 
is seated in the brain, and man there¬ 
fore has a much larger brain, consid¬ 
ering the size of his body, than any 
other animal, and his system of 
nerves, which is connected with 
the brain by means of the spinal 
marrow, and which radiates from it, 
or stretches in all directions, like a 
series of white threads, to every 
part of the frame, is much more per¬ 
fect than in any other living being. 

Mankind have been divided by 
different writers in several different 
ways, some classing them according 
to the shape of their skulls, some 
according to the color of their skins, 
and some according to their hair ; 
but the most usual classification is 
into five great families or races, as 
follows : 

I. Caucasian or white race, so 
named from the Caucasus Mountains 
in Asia, near which they are sup¬ 
posed to have first lived. This fam¬ 
ily is the most powerful and best 
civilized of all the races, and in¬ 
cludes nearly all the great nations 
known in history. It now occupies 
all of Europe, a large part of west¬ 
ern and southern Asia, northern 
Africa, Australia, and most of North 
and South America. 

II. Mongolian or yellow race, so 
called from Mongolia, now a part of 
China, where they came from. 
They live now mostly in China and 
Japan, and in northern and eastern 
Asia. 

III. Ethiopian or black race, so 
called from Ethiopia in Africa, 
which once was a much larger coun¬ 


try than it is now. This family live 
chiefly in central and southern Af¬ 
rica. 

IV. Malay or brown race, named 
from the Malay Peninsula in south¬ 
ern Asia. This family live now in 
south-eastern Asia and in most of 
the islands of the Indian Archipel¬ 
ago and of the Pacific. 

V. American or red race, made 
up of the Indians of both North 
and South America. 

All these families may be subdi¬ 
vided into many kinds, some of 
which differ greatly from each other. 
Thus the features of the Jew are 
very marked, and the American or 
Englishman is easily told from the 
German and the Irishman. 

Notwithstanding these great differ¬ 
ences in the families of mankind, 
most writers think that all men had 
a common beginning, and are de¬ 
scended from one pair of parents, 
who lived many thousand years ago ; 
but there are some who deny this, 
and who believe that each family of 
mankind is separate and had a sepa¬ 
rate pair of parents of its own, and 
therefore that there is no blood rela¬ 
tionship between the different fam¬ 
ilies. Other writers believe that 
man is descended from an animal 
something like the ape. It is not 
thought that any of the now living 
apes was the ancestor of man, but 
that some former kind grew little by 
little both in body and in mind until 
it became like man, and afterward 
advanced through many ages of 
growth to man’s present condition. 

Body of Man. The body of man 
is covered with SKIN, under which 
is what is commonly called flesh, 
but which is rightly called muscle. 
Muscle can easily be divided into 
little slips or shreds, each one of 
which is fastened tight at its ends, 
but is loose in the middle. Each one 
of these slips is called a MUSCLE. 
Between the muscles lie little white 
threads called nerves, and also many 
blood-vessels called veins and arte¬ 
ries. Under the muscles in most 






MAN 


382 


MAN 



Skeleton of Man. 


a, Parietal bone or side bone of skull; 
b, Frontal or forehead bone; c, Vertebrae 
of the neck; d, Sternum or breast bone ; 
e, Spinal column or backbone; f Radius ; 
g t Ulna; h , Carpal or wrist bones; i, 


Metacarpal bones or bones of the middle 
hand ; k , Bones of the fingers; /, Tibia or 
shinbone; m, Fibula; n, Tarsal or ankle 
bones ; o, Metatarsal or instep bones; p , 
Bones of the toe ; q , Knee pan ; r , Femur 
or thigh bone- s, Hip bone; t, Humerus 
or arm bone; u, Collar bone. 

parts of the body are the bones, all 
the different parts of which are 
shown in the picture of the skeleton 
of a man. The body is made up of, 
1, the Trunk, 2, the Head, and 3, 
the Arms and Legs. 

1. The Trunk is hollow from the 
neck to the legs, and is divided into 
two parts by a partition running 
across it called the diaphragm. The 
part below the diaphragm is larger 
than the one above it, and is called 
the abdomen or belly. In it are the 
liver and the stomach, and below 
them the intestine or bowel is coiled 
up in many folds. Under the bow¬ 
els, in the back part of the abdomen, 
are the two kidneys. The smaller 
part of the trunk, above the dia¬ 
phragm, is called the thorax or 
chest. In the middle of it lies the 
heart, and on each side of the heart 
are the two LUNGS. 

The human trunk then is a long 
rounded box to hold the inner parts 
or organs of the body, which, taken 
together, are called the viscera. In 
front it is covered with only muscle 
and skin ; but if there were nothing 
but soft material all around, it would 
not keep its shape, so it is held up 
by the backbone (<?) behind, and in 
the chest the sides are strengthened 
by the ribs. These are thin hoops of 
bone made fast to the backbone 
behind and meeting in front in the 
breast-bone ( d ), made up partly of 
bone and partly of gristle, and 
named the sternum. 

The backbone is not one bone, 
but a pile of twenty-four bones put 
one above the other, and so jointed 
together that each one can turn on 
the other. If this were not so, the 
body could not bend, but would be 
stiff. Each one of these joints is 
I called a vertebra, and is formed 









MAN 


383 


MAN 


like the one shown in the article 
Animal, page 16. When all the 
joints are fitted together, the holes 
in each come one above the other so 
as to make a long tube, called the 
spinal canal, because the spinal 
cord, which leads from the brain, 
passes through it. On the top of 
this column of bones rests the head. 
The. upper bone of the part of the 
backbone called the neck vertebrae 
(c) has two places hollowed out in it, 
and on the bottom of the head are 
two little rockers which fit into them 
so that the head can move easily. 

2. The Head is a roundish box of 
bone, covered over with flesh and 
skin. The bony case, which is called 
the skull, is made up of several 
bones, only two of which are shown 
in the picture, but is all in one piece, 
with the exception of the lower jaw¬ 
bone, which is so jointed to the up¬ 
per jawbone that it can be opened 
and shut. The upper jawbone does 
not move at all except when the 
whole head moves. The opening 
between the two jawbones is the 
gape of the mouth. 

In the jawbones are set the teeth. 
The teeth are like the bones in some 
things, but they do not grow like 
them. The bones grow with the rest 
of the body, but teeth are never any 
larger than when they first come 
through the gums. This is because 
the outside of the teeth, or the en¬ 
amel, as it is called, has to be very 
hard, so that they can cut and grind 
the food ; and this enamel when 
once made is finished, and does not 
grow any more. If the first teeth 
should stay in the head they would 
be too small when the person grows 
up, and as the jaws grew they would 
be far apart instead of close to¬ 
gether. So the first ones begin 
to be shed about the seventh year, 
and a new set, larger and more in 
number, take their place little by lit¬ 
tle, but the second set does not be¬ 
come full until the person is nearly 
of age. 

There are only twenty teeth in 


the first set, ten in each jaw, but the 
second set when full has thirty-two, 
or sixteen in each jaw. Teeth are 
divided into incisors, canines, and 
molars. The incisors (Latin in¬ 
cider e, to cut in), or cutting teeth, 
are the four front teeth in each jaw ; 
the canines (Latin canis, dog), so 
called because they are very long in 
the dog, are the two sharp-pointed 
teeth which grow one on each side 
of the incisors ; the molars (Latin 
tnola, a mill) are all the teeth back 
of the canines, and are used to 
grind the food. 

The skull has a rounded hole in 
its underside, and when it is set on 
the top of the backbone this fits 
directly over the spinal canal, so that 
if a long wire were to be pushed 
up from the bottom of the backbone 
through the canal it would go right 
up into the hollow part of the head. 
In this hollow of the head is the 
brain, which tapers off at the bottom 
and runs down the canal in the back¬ 
bone, forming the spinal cord. On 
each side of the skull is an opening 
for the canal of the ear, and in front 
are two rounded hollows called or¬ 
bits for the eyes, and an opening 
for the nose. 

Between the head and the trunk 
is the neck, through which the back¬ 
bone passes. In the front part, be¬ 
sides muscles, nerves, and blood¬ 
vessels, are two tubes, the trachea, 
commonly called the windpipe, and 
the sesophagus, commonly called the 
gullet. These tubes both lead 
from the throat, which divides into 
two in the upper part of the neck. 
The windpipe, which is made firm 
by hardish rings in it, ends in the 
lungs, but the gullet, which is soft 
so that its sides lie flat together, 
runs down through the chest, lying 
close to the backbone, and passing 
through a hole in the diaphragm 
enters the abdomen, where it widens 
out into the stomach. At the lower 
end of the stomach it narrows again 
into the intestine, and, after winding 
about a good deal in the lower part 




MAN 


384 


MAN 


of the abdomen and forming the 
bowels or intestines, finally leaves 
it. This long tube, made up of 
the gullet, stomach, and intestine 
which thus goes entirely through the 
body without opening into it, is 
called the alimentary canal. 

3. The Arms and Legs have no 
hollow parts, but are made up of a 
framework of bones covered with 
flesh and skin. The arm is made 
up of the upper arm, which is rightly 
called the arm, the lower or fore¬ 
arm, the wrist, and the hand. The 
bones of the arm are made up of one 
rather large bone (/) reaching from 
the shoulder to the elbow, and of 
two bones in the forearm. The bone 
in the upper arm is called the hu¬ 
merus. It is fastened to the shoulder- 
blade by such a joint that it can 
turn in any way. The shoulder- 
blade is jointed in front with the col¬ 
lar-bone (u), which makes a kind of 
brace for it. Of the two bones in the 
forearm the one which is largest at 
the elbow is named the ulna (g), and 
the one which is largest at the wrist 
the radius (/). The end of the 
humerus at the elbow is rounded, 
and the same end of the ulna is 
scooped out so that the humerus fits 
into it. This makes a joint, but 
such a one that the ulna can move 
only up and down and not sidewise. 
It can shut up so as to lie flat 
against the front of the humerus, 
and can be straightened out, but 
cannot be bent backward. The 
radius, the other bone of the fore¬ 
arm, is so made that its end at the 
elbow moves over both the end of 
the humerus and the end of the 
ulna, so that they both move to¬ 
gether when the arm is raised or 
lowered ; but it has also another 
motion, by means of which the 
forearm may be turned round so as 
to bring the palm of the hand up or 
down. 

Although all these bones are 
fitted into each other so as to make 
hinges, they would fall out of their 
places if they were not fastened 


there. In a dried skeleton they are 
usually fastened with wires or strips 
of brass, but in the arm of a live 
person the bones are joined to¬ 
gether with flat thin bands called 
ligaments, which hold them firmly 
in place, but let them move easily. 
The ends of the bones are made 
smooth by a kind of gristle which 
grows all over them, and which is 
kept always moist by a kind of fluid, 
just as the ball of the eye is kept 
moist by tears. Two bones thus 
fitting into each other, their ends 
being made smooth with gristle and 
kept moist, and being held in place 
by ligaments, form what is called a 
joint. There are many other joints 
in the body, but, although they differ 
from each other in some things, they 
all work in much the same way. To 
bend the arm or to work any other 
parts of the body some force must 
be used ; this force is told about 
under muscles. The wrist and 
hand are made up of twenty-seven 
bones, which work together in many 
different ways, so that the hand can 
make a great many movements and 
do almost anything it is wanted to 
do. The parts can be seen in the 
picture, marked h, i, and k. 

The leg is made up of the thigh, 
the lower leg, which is rightly called 
the leg, the ankle, and the foot. The 
hip-bones, to which the leg-bones 
are joined, are fastened tight to the 
lower part of the backbone. On the 
outside of each hip-bone ( s ) is a 
round socket or hollow, in which 
fits the head of the thigh-bone (r). 
This bone, which is named the 
femur, is the largest and strongest 
one in the body. Its lower part is 
made much like the elbow end of the 
humerus, and it is jointed with the 
principal bone of the leg ( e ), com¬ 
monly called the shin-bone, but 
rightly called the tibia, which holds 
up the whole weight of the body. 
The fibula (m), or small bone of the 
leg, lies on the inner side of the 
tibia. It does not help to hold up 
the body, but it is so fastened to the 





MANGO 


385 


MAPLE 


tibia that it helps it to move. Over 
the joint of the knee is a little flat 
bony cap (g) called the knee-pan, 
one of the uses of which is to keep 
the joint from being hurt. Like the 
hand and wrist, the ankle and foot 
are made up of many different bones 
(twenty-six in all), the general form 
of which can be seen in the picture. 
This is not because the foot has as 
many movements as the hand, but 
because it needs to be very loose 
and springy, so that one can walk, 
run, and jump easily. If it were all 
one bone, it would be stiff and clum¬ 
sy. 

Nearly all parts of the body are 
filled full of blood-vessels and nerves. 
The blood-vessels come from the 
heart, the nerves from the brain ; 
so that the heart and the brain are 
the two great centres of the body. 
Everything in the body is made 
from the BLOOD, and in the brain is 
the mind, which does all the thinking 
and gives to man all his senses. 

The word man is from the Anglo- 
Saxon man or mon t man, Sanskrit 
man , to think. 

MANGO, the pickled green fruit 
of the mango tree, which grows in 
India. The fruit, which is orange 
colored when ripe, is about as large 
as a goose egg, and contains a large 
flattened stone with a delicious sweet 
pulp around it. It is much used as 
a dessert in hot countries, and is 
sometimes preserved as a sweetmeat 
in the West Indies. The green fruit 
is pickled and spiced in the East 
Indies, and sent to foreign countries. 

The word mango is from mangga , 
the Malay name of the mango tree. 

MANILA, or MANILA HEMP (so 
called because brought mostly from 
Manila, in the Philippine Islands), 
a material made from the thread-like 
strips, called fibres, of a kind of 
banana or plantain tree, which grows 
in the Philippine Islands. The leaf 
stalks, from which the fibres are 
taken, are pulled off and beaten with 
wooden clubs. The fibres are after¬ 
ward hackled like flax, and then 


carefully sorted, the coarse ones be¬ 
ing used for cordage, etc., and the 
fine ones for weaving. Ropes and 
cordage made of manila are very 
strong and lasting. Fine cloths, 
such as napkins, veils, muslins, etc., 
are woven out of the finer fibres, 
some so fine that one can almost see 
through them. Much paper is 
made from old manila rope. 

MAPLE. There are many kinds 
of maple trees, some of which grow 
in North America, some in Europe, 
and some in Asia. Some are small 
shrubs and others are large trees. 
There are about ten kinds in the 
United States, of which the most 
common are the sugar maple, the 
red or swamp maple, and the white 
or silver maple. 

The Sugar Maple is found mostly 
in the Northern and Middle States. 
It is a very handsome shade tree, 
and in the autumn its leaves show 
many beautiful colors. Its wood 
ranks next to hickory for fuel, and it 
makes the best of charcoal. Some 
of it is straight grained, and is used 
for making lasts for shoes, buckets, 
and other articles ; and some kinds, 
called curled and bird’s eye maple, 
because its grain is twisted or 
marked like birds’ eyes, are used in 
cabinet work. The sap of the sugar 
maple is very sweet, having in it the 
same kind of sugar as in the SUGAR 
cane, and from it maple sugar and 
maple syrup are made. As soon as 
the sap begins to flow in the spring, 
often as early as February, holes 
are bored into the trunks of the 
trees a little way above the roots, and 
little pipes, made often of ELDER, 
fitted into them. The sap, which 
flows out through the pipes drop 
by drop, is caught in buckets, and 
boiled down in great kettles until 
most of the water in it passes off in 
steam and that which is left is thick 
like syrup. Some of this is put up 
in tin cans and sent to town for sale, 
and some is boiled down still more 
until it is so thick that when it cools 
it will turn to sugar. That to be 






MARBLE 


386 


MARBLE 


made into sugar is poured into pans 
of different shapes, some round, 
some square, and some scalloped, 
like the cakes of maple sugar seen 
in stores. The most maple sugar is 
made in Vermont, New York, and 
Ohio, but a good deal is also made 
in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, 
and Indiana. 

The Swamp Maple, sometimes 
called red maple, grows mostly in 
damp woods and swamps. In the 
autumn it is one of the most beauti¬ 
ful of our trees, its leaves showing 
all the shades of orange, scarlet, and 
crimson. Its wood is not so good for 
fuel as the sugar maple, as it is 
softer and burns quicker. It is used 
for gun stocks, lasts, and cheap fur¬ 
niture, and its bark for making a 
black dye. 

The Silver Maple, sometimes called 
white maple, is much prized in the 
Western States for planting on the 
prairies, as it grows quickly, and 
makes a fine shade tree. The wood 
is good for fuel, but is too soft and 
decays too soon to be used much 
for lumber. 

The Saxons called this tree mapel- 
trepy and our name for it has grown 
odt of this word through several 
changes. 

MARBLE, a fine kind of limestone, 
used chiefly for building and for 
sculpture. It is properly a carbonate 
of lime (calcium carbonate), being 
made up of calcium, carbon, and 
OXYGEN. It is easily burned, like 
other limestone, into lime, is soft 
and easy to work with the chisel or 
hammer, and is generally of even 
grain, so that it can be split with 
wedges. Though all marble is 
made up of the same things, it is of 
many different kinds, some being 
coarse-grained and fit only for build¬ 
ing, and others fine-grained enough 
for making statues and the most 
delicate ornaments. Some kinds 
too are very lasting, while others are 
soft and easily crumbled into pieces 
by the weather. 

Marble is among the most beau¬ 


tiful of all stones, being found of all 
colors, and often marked with 
stripes, spots, and shades of many 
different tints. White, gray, yellow, 
red, blue, green, brown, and black 
marbles have been used in architec¬ 
ture from the oldest times, and many 
of the quarries opened by the an¬ 
cients are still worked. The most 
noted of the ancient white marbles 
were the Parian, named from the 
island of Paros, where it was found, 
and the Pentelic, quarried on Mount 
Pentelicus, near Athens. Many of 
the finest of the Greek statues were 
made of these marbles, and most of 
the famous temples in Athens were 
built of Pentelic marble. The Parian 
quarries are not now worked, and 
only a little marble is taken from 
Mount Pentelicus. Most of the 
marble used now for making statues 
is brought from Carrara in Italy, 
where the quarries have been worked 
since the time of Julius Caesar ; but 
very good statuary marble is found 
in Vermont, and in other States of 
the United States. 

The most noted of the ancient col¬ 
ored marbles are those called by the 
Italians nero antico (black antique), 
rosso antico (red antique), verde 
antico (green antique), and giallo 
antico (yellow antique). Nero an¬ 
tico is the blackest of all marbles, 
other black marbles looking gray 
when put beside it. It is not known 
where it was quarried. Rosso antico 
is deep red marked with layers of 
white and fine black veins. It is 
supposed to have come from Greece. 
Verde antico is green beautifully 
marked and shaded with white. It 
was quarried in Thessaly. Giallo 
antico is sometimes cream yellow 
and sometimes bright yellow shad¬ 
ing into red and purple hues. We 
do not know where it was quarried, 
but some think in North Africa. 
The ancients used also many other 
very beautiful marbles to ornament 
their buildings with, some of which 
are known only through pieces picked 
up among the ruins of cities. 




MARBLES 


387 


MARBLES 


In modern times a great number 
of new quarries have been opened in 
all parts of the world, and although 
we do not know where the ancients 
got some of their most noted mar¬ 
bles, we have many others which are 
scarcely inferior to them in beauty. 
The most beautiful colored marbles 
in the United States are found in 
Vermont, though fine kinds of differ¬ 
ent colors are quarried in Maryland, 
New York, Pennsylvania, and Mas¬ 
sachusetts. 

Marble is so much more valuable 
than common building stone that 
much more care is taken in quarry¬ 
ing it. It is never blasted out with 
gunpowder, but is usually carefully 
split out in square blocks by means 
of wedges. These blocks are after¬ 
ward sawn up, with toothless iron 
saws fed with sharp sand and water, 
into slabs of the size wanted. Slabs 
for building houses are usually sawn 
only five or six inches thick, and 
then set against a brick back ; this 
looks as well as a wall of solid mar¬ 
ble, and is much cheaper. Slabs for 
mantels, table tops, and ornamental 
work are sawn in the same way, and 
then carefully ground down smooth 
with fine sand and PUMICE, and pol¬ 
ished with rubbers of woollen cloth 
and putty powder and water. 

The word marble is from the Lat¬ 
in marmor , marble. 

MARBLES are named from the 
Latin word viari 7 ior , marble, prob¬ 
ably because they were first made 
out of marble. Some marbles are 
made of potter’s clay and baked in 
an oven, just as earthenware is 
baked, but most of them are made of 
a hard kind of stone, found in Sax¬ 
ony, Germany. Marbles are manu¬ 
factured there in great numbers, and 
sent to India, China, the United 
States, and other countries. The 
stone is broken up with a hammer 
into little square pieces, which are 
then ground round in a mill. The 
mill has a fixed slab of stone with its 
surface full of little grooves or fur¬ 
rows. Above this a flat block of oak 


wood, of the same size as the stone, 
is made to turn round rapidly, and 
while turning little streams of water 
run in the grooves and keep the mill 
from getting too hot. About a hun¬ 
dred of the square pieces of stone 
are put into the grooves at once, 
and in a few minutes are ground 
round and polished by the wooden 
block. 

Marbles are also made out of china 
and of white marble. Such ones 
are usually called by boys “ chinas,” 
or “alleys.” Real china ones are 
made of porcelain clay, and baked 
like china ware or other pottery. 
Some of them have a pearly glaze, 
and some are painted in bright colors 
which will not rub off because they 
are baked in just as the pictures are 
on plates and cups and saucers. 
Marble alleys are also painted some¬ 
times. 

Glass marbles, usually called 
“agates,” are made of both clear 
and colored glass. Clear glass mar¬ 
bles are made by taking up a little 
melted glass on the end of an iron 
rod and making it round by dropping 
it into an iron mould which shapes 
it, or by whirling it round the head 
until the glass is made into a ball. 
Sometimes the figure of a dog, squir¬ 
rel, or other animal is put on the end 
of the rod, and when it is dipped 
into the melted glass the glass flows 
all round it, and when the marble is 
done you can see the animal shut up 
in it. Colored glass marbles are 
made by holding a bunch of glass 
rods of different colors in the fire 
until they melt; then the workman 
twists them round into a ball or 
presses them in a mould, so that 
when done the marble is marked 
with bands and ribbons of color. 

Real agates, which are the hand¬ 
somest of all marbles, are made 
mostly at Oberstein in Germany, out 
of the stone called agate. The 
workmen chip the pieces of agate 
nearly round with hammers, and 
then grind them round and smooth 
on grindstones. 





MARJORAM 


388 


MAT 


MARJORAM, a plant, some kinds 
of which are used as a seasoning in 
cookery. The most common kind is 
the sweet marjoram, which came 
from Asia and North Africa. Its 
leaves and buds are dried and pow¬ 
dered and used to flavor soups, 
stews, and stuffings. 

The word marjoram is from the 
new Latin majoraca, which is from 
the old Latin amaracum , mar¬ 
joram. 

MARMALADE, a kind of preserve 
made by boiling fruits, such as 
oranges, pineapples, and quinces. 
The most common kind is orange 
marmalade, made usually from the 
bitter or Seville orange. The rind is 
first boiled enough to get off the 
white inside part, and the outside 
part is then cut up and boiled with 
the juice of the orange, which has 
been squeezed out of the pulp, and 
an equal weight of sugar. Orange 
marmalade is largely made in Dun¬ 
dee, Scotland, and shipped from 
there to foreign countries. 

The word marmalade is from the 
Portuguese marmalada, from mar- 
melo , a quince, probably because 
marmalade was first made out of 
quinces. 

MARTEN. The pine marten, or 
American sable, as it is more rightly 
called, is found in the more norther¬ 
ly parts of North America, especially 
in the thick pine woods. It looks 
much like the weasel (see Mam¬ 
mals), having a slim body, bushy 
tail, and short legs. Its general col¬ 
or is rusty yellow, with darker marks 
on the back. In winter its fur is very 
handsome, and it is then much hunt¬ 
ed. It is usually caught in traps, 
baited with a piece of fresh meat, 
and which are so made that a heavy 
board falls and kills the animal. Its 
fur is prized next after that of the 
sable, and it is sometimes dyed and 
sold for Russian sable. 

The pine marten of Europe is 
much like the American pine mar¬ 
ten, but is thought to be a different 
animal, though of the same family. 


The marten is a mammal of the 
order carnivora, or flesh - eating 
animals, and of the weasel family. 

The word marten is from the 
Anglo-Saxon meardh, marten. 

MARTIN, an American bird, of 
the swallow family, but larger than 
the swallow. The most common 
kind is the purple martin, whose col¬ 
or is blue black with purple shades. 
Martins are found in the most 
southerly parts of the United States 
in February, appear in the Middle 
States and New England in April, 
and begin to go south again in Au¬ 
gust. They return every year to the 
same places and build tneir nests in 
the little boxes that are usually set 
up for them around farmhouses and 
in villages. They lay four to six 
white eggs, and usually raise two 
broods each year. In England the 
swallow is sometimes called martin, 
after Saint Martin. 

MASTIC, the gum of the mastic 
plant, a shrub which grows around 
the Mediterranean. The shrub is 
sometimes twice as high as a man. 
In July and August the gum comes 
through the bark and hardens in 
little tear-shaped lumps, which are 
picked off. The Turkish ladies 
chew it because they think it makes 
the breath pure and preserves the 
teeth. When mixed with oil of 
TURPENTINE it makes a fine var¬ 
nish, which is much used for varnish¬ 
ing oil paintings. 

The word mastic is from the Greek 
mastiche, which is from in as as that, 
to chew. 

MAT, a woven fabric of rushes, 
straw, husks, rope, or other mate¬ 
rial. Mats are now mostly made 
of hemp rope, but some are of In¬ 
dia-rubber. What are called bass or 
bast mats is a kind of matting made 
in Russia and Sweden from the inner 
bark of the linden tree. They are 
used mostly for packing furniture, 
covering tender plants in gardens, 
etc. 

The word mat is from the Latin 
matta , a rush mat. 





MATCH 


389 


MERCURY 


MATCH. The first matches were 
little sticks of white pine wood with 
their ends dipped into melted sul¬ 
phur or brimstone. These, which 
were called brimstone matches, 
would not take fire by rubbing, but 
were lighted by sparks made by strik¬ 
ing fire with a flint and steel into 
tinder, or linen rags scraped fine. 
The next kind were dipped in chlo¬ 
rate of POTASH and some other 
things, which took fire when touched 
with SULPHURIC ACID ; so every 
box of matches sold had a little vial 
of sulphuric acid in it. About fifty 
years ago (1829) an English chemist 
found out how to make lucifer 
matches, which would take fire when 
rubbed, and since that time the mak¬ 
ing of matches has become an im¬ 
portant business. 

Matches are made out of clear 
white pine. The wood is sawed up 
into blocks, and the blocks are then 
forced endwise through thick steel 
plates filled full of little holes, each 
just the size of a match, and made 
sharp at the edges so as to cut. In 
England only round matches are 
made in this way, the square ones 
being split by two sets of little 
knives, one set working up and 
down and the other crosswise ; but 
in the United States square matches 
are made by forcing the wood 
through square holes. The splints 
are then dipped into sulphur, 
and afterward into PHOSPHORUS 
mixed with some other things. 
Sometimes thin wax-tapers are used 
instead of wood splints for making 
matches,, and some matches are 
made without sulphur. 

Safety matches have the sub¬ 
stances which make them take fire 
in two parts, neither part of which 
will burn unless it is rubbed on the 
other. For instance, the match it¬ 
self will have only potash on the end, 
while the phosphorus will be on a 
piece of sandpaper on the outside of 
the box, and the match must be 
rubbed on the box to light it. 

The word match is in French 


meche , and is probably from the Lat¬ 
in myxus, a lamp nozzle, or tube 
which holds the wick. Lucifer 
means light-bringer, and is from 
the Latin lux , light and ferre , to 
bring. 

MELON, the fruit of a plant of the 
gourd family, to which the cucumber 
also belongs. There are in the 
United States two principal kinds 
of melons, called muskmelons and 
watermelons, both of which are 
supposed to have first come from 
southern Asia. Among the best 
kinds of muskmelons are the citron, 
cantaloupe, nutmeg, and pineapple. 
The cantaloupe is named from Can- 
taluppi, a place near Rome, where 
it was first cultivated in Europe. 
The nutmeg is liked best by most 
people, but the green citron is the 
principal market muskmelon, and 
is largely sent from the South to 
New York and other northern cities. 
Among the best watermelons are 
the Spanish, Carolina, mountain 
sweet, orange, and the apple-seeded. 
They are all raised largely in the 
South. The citron watermelon is 
used for making sweetmeats. Its 
rind or skin is good for making 
sweet pickles. 

The word melon is from the Lat¬ 
in melo , melon. 

MERCURY, a metal and one of 
the elements, commonly called 
quicksilver, because it looks like 
silver and flows quickly. It is the 
only metal which is liquid at the 
common heat of the air. Small 
drops of pure mercury are some¬ 
times found, but it is usually made 
from an ore called cinnabar (mer¬ 
cury sulphide), made up of mercury 
and SULPHUR. The metal is easily 
got out by heating it in close cast- 
iron vessels with quick-LlME. The 
lime takes up the sulphur and the 
mercury passes off as a vapor 
through tubes into a vessel contain¬ 
ing water, where it is condensed into 
liquid mercury. Pure mercury is 
very heavy, as bright as silver, and 
is not tarnished by air at the com- 







METAL 


390 


METAL 


mon heat, but when heated it takes 
up OXYGEN from the air and is 
turned into a red powder (mercury 
oxide). By heating this mercury 
oxide still stronger the oxygen can 
be driven off again and the mercury 
turned back to a fluid. Mercury be¬ 
comes a solid in a great degree of 
cold (39 0 to 40° below zero, Fahren¬ 
heit). 

Mercury is much used for making 
THERMOMETERS and BAROMETERS, 
for silvering MIRRORS, and for get¬ 
ting GOLD and SILVER from their 
ores. It unites with most of the 
other metals to form alloys called 
AMALGAMS. The principal com¬ 
pounds of mercury are vermilion 
(mercury sulphide), made up of 
mercury and sulphur, used as a 
paint ; calomel (mercurous chloride), 
made up of mercury and CHLORINE, 
used in medicine; and corrosive 
sublimate (mercury chloride), also 
made up of mercury and chlorine, 
but in different proportions, which is 
a deadly poison. 

Cinnabar, the ore from which mer¬ 
cury is mostly made, is found chiefly 
in Spain, Austria, California, and 
Peru. 

Mercury was named by the old 
chemists after the heathen god 
Mercury. 

METAL, an element which unites 
with oxygen and hydrogen to form 
a base. When we speak of a 
metal in this article we mean a pure 
metal, from which everything else 
has been separated. The metals 
which we see every day are not pure, 
but are mixed with other things. 

All metals are alike in some 
things. They are all opaque, that 
is, you cannot see through them ; 
and they all have lustre, or a shiny 
surface. With the exception of gold 
and copper, their color is a grayish 
white, with sometimes a bluish or 
pinkish tinge. In their natural state 
they are all solids, except MERCURY, 
which is a liquid ; but they differ in 
hardness : titanium can scarcely be 
scratched by anything, while SODIUM 


and potassium are as soft as wax. 
Most of them are heavier than water 
(platinum is more than twenty- 
one times as heavy), but some are 
so light that they will float in water 
(lithium is only about one half as 
heavy). All metals can be melted, 
except arsenic, but some take much 
more heat to melt them than others. 

Metals differ from each other in 
malleability, ductility, and tenacity. 
A metal is said to be malleable 
(Latin, malleus , a hammer) when it 
can be hammered out into thin 
leaves. Gold is the most malleable 
of all metals ; next to it come in 
order silver, copper, platinum, 
iron, tin, zinc, and lead. Some 
metals are so brittle that they cannot 
be hammered at all, and some have 
to be heated to a certain degree be¬ 
fore they become malleable. 

A metal is said to be ductile (Latin, 
ductilis , from due ere, to draw) 
when it can be drawn out like wire. 
Gold is the most ductile of all met¬ 
als ; next to it come in order silver, 
platinum, iron, copper, zinc, tin, and 
lead. 

A metal is said to have tenacity 
(Latin, tenere , to hold) when it has 
strength or the power of holding to¬ 
gether under a strain. Iron is the 
most tenacious of all metals : an iron 
wire will hold up twenty-six times as 
much weight as a lead wire of the 
same size. Next to iron in tenacity 
come the other metals in the follow¬ 
ing order : copper, platinum, silver, 
zinc, gold, tin, lead. 

Only seven metals were known to 
the ancients : gold, silver, mercury, 
copper, lead, tin, and iron, but now 
between fifty and sixty are known 
(see Element). Bismuth and an¬ 
timony were found out in the 
fifteenth, zinc in the sixteenth, and 
arsenic in the seventeenth century ; 
of the rest, ten, including cobalt, 
platinum, NICKEL, and manganese, 
were found out in the last century, 
and all the rest in this century. 

About one half of all the known 
metals are very scarce, and some of 





METAL WORK 


39i 


METAL WORK 


them have been seen by only a few 
persons. A few of the metals are 
found in the native state—that is, 
pure or unmixed with other minerals 
—but most of them are generally 
mixed with oxygen or sulphur. 

The word metal is from the Latin 
metallum , Greek metallon , a metal. 

METAL WORK. Something has 
been told about the working of metals 
in the different articles on them, es¬ 
pecially in Iron, Copper, Lead, 
Tin, Zinc, and Nickel, and in 
those on the Alloys, such as 
Bronze, Brass, and Pewter. In 
the article Statue also is told 
about the making of metal statues, 
in Bell about the casting of bells, 
and in the articles on cutlery, such 
as Axe, Chisel, Knife, Scissors, 
and Scythe, is described the way 
of forging iron. In this article, 
therefore, we shall tell only about 
some of the finer kinds of metal 
work, which we shall divide into 
three parts—cast metal, wrought 
metal, and electro-plate. 

Cast Metal is any metal melted 
and poured into moulds, so that 
when cool it has the shape of the 
mould. This seems very easy to 
do, but it is really very hard to do 
well, especially because some met¬ 
als, such as gold, silver, copper, and 
iron, can be cast only in moulds 
made of sand. The reason of this 
is, that these metals when melted 
will not lie close enough in moulds 
made of anything else to fill up the 
finer parts, and thus the things cast 
will not be of the exact shape of the 
pattern. But when cast in sand 
moulds these metals will flow into 
all the smallest parts of the pattern, 
and thus make a perfect copy of it. 
The sand is made moist enough to 
make the grains stick together, and 
the pattern of the thing to be cast is 
buried in it in the mould. The mould 
is made in two parts, so that it can 
be opened to take out the pattern, 
which, when the parts of the mould 
are closed again, leaves in the sand 
a hollow place of exactly its shape 


and size. Into this the melted metal 
is poured, and when cool it forms a 
casting of the pattern, which only 
needs smoothing to be finished. 
The sand mould has to be broken 
to get the casting out, and a new 
one has to be made for each piece. 
Real bronze, which is mostly cop¬ 
per, can be cast only in sand 
moulds ; but false bronze, which is 
made of spelter or zinc, can be cast 
in brass moulds which open like a 
bullet mould to take out the casting, 
and which can be used over and 
over again to make castings. Com¬ 
mon mantel ornaments, gas-fixtures, 
and many other things are cast in 
this way out of spelter, and varnished 
to look like real BRONZE. They do 
not need so much finishing as real 
bronze, which has to be smoothed 
and polished, and are therefore 
cheaper. 

The Japanese make very fine cast¬ 
ings in bronze and other metals by 
making a pattern of the thing to be 
cast in a kind of vegetable wax, and 
then covering it over with a mixture 
of clay, sand, and charcoal dampened 
with water. Several coats of this 
are put on, each one being allowed 
to dry, until the mould is thick 
enough. It is then heated hot 
enough to melt the wax, which runs 
out of a hole made for it, thus leav¬ 
ing a space inside exactly like the 
pattern, into which the metal is 
poured. Sometimes, instead of a 
wax model, they cover the body of 
an animal, such as a frog, a lizard, 
or a crab, in the same way, then 
heat the whole hot enough to burn 
up the animal, when they blow the 
ashes out through holes. In this way 
a perfect copy of the animal is made. 

Metal castings are not smooth and 
finished when they come out of the 
moulds, like those which we see in 
stores, but have a good many rough 
places on them which have to be cut 
off with chisels and smoothed with 
files. Sometimes a great deal of 
labor is needed to finish a piece, es¬ 
pecially in a statue where much flesh 





METAL WORK 


392 


METAL WORK 


is shown. In this the skin, the hair, 
and the drapery or clothing have to 
be worked up in different ways, 
called “ chasing,” “ matting,” etc. 

Wrought Metal. Under this head 
may be put all metal things made by 
hammering, stamping, punching, 
rolling, and spinning. In old times 
much metal working was done by 
hand by slowly hammering pieces 
into shape, but now a large part of 
this kind of work is done by ma¬ 
chinery. Tin pans, once made of 
separate pieces cut out of sheet tin, 
and soldered together, are now 
stamped out of one piece by means 
of heavy dies worked by steam ; 
and brass kettles and many other 
things made of brass are stamped 
out in the same way. The bowls of 
spoons, too, which were once care¬ 
fully hammered out by many blows 
of a hand hammer, are now shaped 
with a single blow from a heavy 
drop-hammer. 

Silver plate, and the different 
kinds of metal called britannia ware, 
queen’s ware, white metal, used for 
making tea-pots, coffee-pots, soup- 
tureens, cups, and other common 
things, were once worked into shape 
by many blows of the hand hammer. 
The piece of metal was first ham¬ 
mered out flat, and then worked 
into shape by being hammered over 
an anvil. The parts of a vase or a 
tea-pot were thus formed in separate 
pieces, and then fastened together 
with solder. But now the metal 
is rolled out into a sheet between 
heavy steel rollers, which are 
screwed closer to each other each 
time the metal is passed between 
them. The metal plate or sheet 
thus made, which is very smooth 
and of even thickness, is then shaped 
on a lathe in a way called “ spin¬ 
ning.” The plate is fastened be¬ 
tween two pieces of wood, one of 
which, called the “ chuck,” is of the 
exact shape of the inside of the ves¬ 
sel to be made. The whole is made 
to turn round very fast, and the 
workman, by pressing a tool called a 


“burnisher,” which has a smooth 
steel head, against the outside of the 
plate, bends it over and makes it 
take the shape of the chuck. When 
it is fitted closely, the lathe is 
stopped, and the chuck, which is 
made up of several pieces, like a 
hat-block, is taken out. Large 
pieces like tea-pots, soup-tureens, 
etc., are usually spun in several 
pieces and put together with solder ; 
but small pieces, such as cups, are 
spun out of one piece. Much com¬ 
mon ware is now made by stamping 
in machines, each piece being made 
in two halves, which are then sol¬ 
dered together. This way is much 
cheaper, because almost any kind of 
ornament can thus be stamped on 
the piece. 

The finest way of ornamenting 
hollow ware is called repouss£ y a 
French word meaning “ pushed 
out.” This is done by hammering 
out from the inside metal enough to 
make the ornaments on the outside. 
This takes a good deal of time and 
skill, and is so costly that it can be 
put only on valuable work, such as 
fine silver ware. This hammering 
out makes only lumps on the outside 
having the general shape of the 
ornament, which has then to be fin¬ 
ished by hand with different kinds 
of tools. Repousse work is now 
imitated so closely by stamping with 
machines that it is hard to tell it 
from the real work. 

Electro-Plate. In former times sil¬ 
ver-plated ware was made out of 
metal covered with a thin plate of 
silver. The metal, which was 
usually copper, had the plate of sil¬ 
ver laid on it, and the two were then 
heated hot and rolled between heavy 
rollers, which fastened the two tightly 
together. The tea-pot or other ves¬ 
sel was then made out of this rolled 
plate. Gold-plated ware was made 
in the same way. But now all 
pieces are plated after they are made, 
in a way called electro-plating, be¬ 
cause it is done by electricity. 

In the article Electricity is told 





METAL WORK 


393 


METAL WORK 


about the Voltaic or Galvanic bat¬ 
tery, and a picture of one made up 
of four cups or cells is given on page 
213. The ends of the wires con¬ 
necting the first and tfie last cell are 
called the poles of the battery, A 
being named the positive pole and B 
the negative pole. When these two 
poles are joined together a current 
of electricity is all the time flowing 
round and round in the way the 
arrows point in the picture. Soon 
after the Voltaic battery was first 
made, it was found out that if the 
current was made to flow through a 
metallic SALT, such as nitrate of SIL¬ 
VER, the salt would be separated into 
its parts, and the metal would fasten 
itself to the negative pole, while the 
ACID or other thing with which the 
metal was mixed would go to the 
positive pole. Though this was 
known almost as soon as the battery 
was found out, it was many years 
before it was known how to make 
any good use of it in plating metals ; 
but it is now of great value in the 
arts, for by means of this principle 
almost all kinds of plating are done 
and many metal things are made 
which could not be made in any 
other way. 

In silver and gold plating the 
pieces to be plated, which are usually 
made of copper, brass, or German 
silver, because these metals are 
found to take the plate easiest, are 
hung in what is called a “ bath,” a 
kind of box large enough to hold as 
much of the liquid to be used as will 
cover them. For silver and gold 
plating the liquid is commonly PO¬ 
TASSIUM cyanide, mixed with hot 
water. The piece to be plated is 
hung in the liquid by a copper wire 
which is joined to the negative pole 
of a battery. If the plating is to be 
of silver, pieces of that metal are put 
into the bath near the piece to be 
plated, and they are joined to the 
other or positive pole of the battery. 
The electric circuit is thus made, so 
that a current of electricity flows 
round and round through the silver 


pieces, taking off silver from them 
and carrying it to the thing to be 
plated. Just as much metal is put 
on the thing to be plated as is taken 
from the pieces of silver. As the 
silver sometimes spreads itself un¬ 
evenly, the thing is kept moving a 
little, which makes the plate of the 
same thickness all over. When the 
plated piece is taken out of the bath 
the coating of silver looks dull, but 
it is easily polished bright. Almost 
all silver-plated articles, such as tea- 
sets, candlesticks, vases, spoons, 
forks, thimbles, pencil-cases, and 
the many other things in common 
use, are now made in this way. 

Gold plating is done in the same 
way, only pieces of gold are put into 
the bath instead of pieces of silver. 
Things made of iron, zinc, tin, pew¬ 
ter, and britannia metal are not as 
easily plated with silver and gold as 
copper, brass, and German silver ; 
so they are generally first plated 
with a coating of copper, which is 
put on in the same way, only a differ¬ 
ent liquid is used in the bath. The 
thing thus coated with copper can 
then be easily plated with silver or 
gold. Things too can be plated with 
nickel, zinc, and other metals, and 
even ALLOYS, such as bronze and 
brass, can be used for plating on cop¬ 
per, or metals can be plated on al¬ 
loys. 

Metals can also be plated on things 
which are not metals. For instance, 
plaster or clay statues can be cov¬ 
ered with a metal, and cloth, lace, 
flowers, plants, and insects may 
thus be coated with gold, silver, 
copper, zinc, etc. Even a spider’s 
web has been plated with gold and 
silver. In this way, too, copies of 
costly pieces of metal-work, such as 
vases of gold and silver, may be 
easily made. This is done by mak¬ 
ing a mould of the outside of the 
vase or other piece in wax, gutta¬ 
percha, sulphur, or some other sub¬ 
stance, in two parts, which are after¬ 
ward put together. The inside of 
the mould is then covered with a 




MICA 


394 


MILK 


thin coat of BLACK lead, which is 
a good conductor of electricity. 
The mould is then put into the bath, 
where it soon becomes coated all 
over the inside with a thin plate of 
copper, which is an exact copy of 
the vase. This is then plated in a 
silver or gold bath just like any 
other article, and when polished can 
scarcely be told from the one from 
which it was made. 

Electrotype plates, used in print¬ 
ing books, are made in the same 
way. A wax mould is made from 
each page of type or pictures. This 
is then covered with a very thin 
coating of black lead and put into 
the bath, where in two or three hours 
a coating of copper is formed on all 
parts of the mould where the black 
lead is. This coating, which is 
called a “shell,” is about as thick 
as common letter paper, and is a 
perfect copy of the page of type. It 
is usually made stronger by pouring 
melted type metal into the back, 
which makes the plate about an 
eighth of an inch thick. When used 
this is generally nailed on to a piece 
of board thick enough to make the 
plate just as high as a common type 
(see Printing). 

MICA, a kind of mineral made up 
of several different things, and 
found in little shining scales in gran¬ 
ite and some other rocks. It is 
commonly called isinglass. It is 
sometimes found in quite large 
pieces, which split up into thin 
plates, having a pearly shine, and 
which are so transparent that they 
can be used instead of glass in win¬ 
dows and lanterns. It is also used 
in the doors of stoves. The largest 
sheets of mica are found in Siberia 
and in Sweden, but some very large 
pieces have been found in this coun¬ 
try in New Hampshire and North 
Carolina. 

The word mica is from the Latin 
micare , to shine. 

MICROSCOPE, an instrument to 
aid us in seeing things which are too 
small to be seen well with the naked 


eye. When we try to look at any¬ 
thing which is very small, the image 
which the rays of light from it 
make in the eye is too small to be 
clearly seen ; and if we bring the 
thing close to the eye the rays of 
light from it will be so scattered that 
the image will be blurred, that is, 
not clear. But if we put a convex 
LENS between the eye and the thing 
to be looked at we shall be able to 
bring it much nearer, and the rays 
will be so bent to a point that the 
eye can take them in all at once, 
and the thing will appear larger and 
plainer. A lens thus used is called 
a magnifying glass (from Latin mag - 
nus , large), because the thing looked 
at is magnified or made larger by it. 
When a magnifying glass is fitted 
into a tube so that in looking through 
it you look through the tube also, 
it is called a simple microscope. 
The compound microscope is made 
up of two convex lenses in a tube, 
one of which is called the object- 
glass, and the other one the eye¬ 
glass. The thing looked at is first 
magnified by the object-glass, and 
this enlarged image is again magni¬ 
fied by the eye-glass. 

The microscope is one of the 
most wonderful and interesting of 
instruments, for by its means we 
have been able to find out not only 
how a great many things are made, 
but also that there are in the world 
a great number of living things which 
we did not know about before. It 
has shown us that every drop of 
water, every leaf, and indeed almost 
every particle of animal and vege¬ 
table matter, is filled with multi¬ 
tudes of little creatures so small that 
they cannot be seen with the naked 
eye, but which are as wonderfully 
made as ourselves (see Animal¬ 
cule). 

The word microscope is from the 
Greek niikros, small, and skopein, 
to see. 

MILK. To the naked eye' milk 
looks like a white liquid not at all 
transparent ; but if we examine it 






MILK 


395 


MINK 


with a microscope we shall see that 
it is really a bluish transparent liq¬ 
uid filled with round floating balls 
of fat, each one enclosed in a sepa¬ 
rate film or thin skin of ALBUMEN. 
These little balls are so small that 
if you put ten thousand of them in a 
row they would not measure more 
than one inch. When milk is set 
away in pans in a cool place for a 
few hours, these balls of fat rise to 
the top by thousands and form the 
rich yellow crust called cream. By 
churning cream the cases of the balls 
are broken, and the fat runs together 
and makes butter. After the 
cream has been taken off of milk, 
what remains is called skim-milk. 
Skim-milk is made up of curd or 
caseine (Latin caseus , cheese), from 
which CHEESE is made, and of 
whey, a thin watery liquid, in which 
the caseine is dissolved. Milk con¬ 
tains sugar also, and when it is kept 
too long this sugar causes it to fer¬ 
ment (see Beer) or work, which 
forms lactic ACID and turns the milk 
sour. The lactic acid mixes with 
the caseine, which in sweet milk is 
like the white of raw egg, and co¬ 
agulates it or makes it thick like 
the white of egg boiled. This is 
commonly called curdling (see 
Cheese). 

Milk is given by the females of all 
mammals. All kinds of milk are 
made up of the same things, but in 
different quantities. Cow’s milk has 
more fat and caseine in it and less 
sugar than human milk. In foreign 
countries the milk of the goat, 
sheep, ass, mare, and bison are 
much used ; but none is so good as 
cow’s milk. In the United States is 
made much condensed milk, which 
will keep sweet for a long time, and 
is very useful to carry on sea voy¬ 
ages. It is only cow’s milk boiled 
down until the water is out of it, and 
then sweetened with a little sugar, 
thus making a thick sweet paste 
which is sealed up in tin cans. Large 
air pumps are used to pump the 
air out of the covered pans in which • 


it is boiled, and in this way it is 
thickened very quickly. 

The word milk is from the Anglo- 
Saxon mile. 

MILKWEED, the common name 
of a family of plants, so called be¬ 
cause they are full of milky juice. 
All the milkweeds belong in North 
and South America, though some 
are now cultivated in Europe as or¬ 
namental plants. The seeds are 
covered with a beautiful silky down, 
which has been mixed with cotton 
and made into cloth, but the threads 
are weak. In the Southern States the 
common milkweed is called Virginia 
silk. Its root is used in medicine. 

MILLET, the name of several 
kinds of grasses, the seeds of which 
are used for food. The grains are 
very small, but the number on each 
stalk is so great as to make it worth 
raising in countries where Indian 
corn and other grains do not grow 
well. In Africa, India, and in 
some parts of Europe it is much 
raised for food, both for men and 
cattle. The seeds are ground up 
into meal for bread, and a kind of 
beer is also made from them. 

The word millet is from the 
Latin milium , which is thought to 
be from Latin mille , a thousand, 
because millet is so fruitful that it 
sometimes yields a thousand seeds 
for every one planted. 

MINK, a small animal valued for 
its fur, found in the cold parts of 
North America, Europe, and Asia. 
The common American mink, which 
looks much like a weasel, is twelve 
to eighteen inches long, and has a 
bushy tail half as long again. Its 
color is dark brown, though some 
are yellowish brown, and its tail is 
nearly black. It lives in burrows 
dug in the banks of rivers and ponds, 
feeds on small birds, frogs, crawfish, 
and other fish, and will often steal 
chickens at night, at which time it 
is most active. The fur of the 
mink is sometimes called the Amer¬ 
ican sable and is for used making 
muffs, tippets, etc. 




MINNOW 


39 6 


MIRROR 


The mink is a mammal of the or¬ 
der carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the weasel family, which 
includes also the common weasel, 
the ERMINE, SABLE, MARTEN, FER¬ 
RET, POLECAT, SKUNK, and OTTER. 

MINNOW, the common name of 
many kinds of little fishes found in 
brooks in all parts of the United 
States. Some of them are really 
DACE. They are used mostly for 
bait to catch other fish. 

The word minnow is probably 
from the French menu , small, Latin 
minutus , minute, little. 

MINT, a sweet-smelling plant. 
There are many kinds of mint, the 
most useful of which are spearmint 
and peppermint. Spearmint, which 
is the common mint found in gar¬ 
dens, was brought to this country 
from Europe, but is now found al¬ 
most everywhere in the United 
States. Its leaves are used in mak¬ 
ing mint sauce for roast lamb, and 
for flavoring soups and various 
drinks. The oil of mint is distilled 
(see Alcohol) from them; and 
from the oil is made the essence of 
mint and mint water. Peppermint 
is raised chiefly for making oil of 
peppermint, used for flavoring con¬ 
fectionery, and for making cordials, 
and essences. Essence of pepper¬ 
mint is made by mixing the oil with 
alcohol. It is much used in medi¬ 
cine. 

Mint is named from Minthe, the 
name of a nymph who was changed 
by Proserpine into this plant. 

MIRROR, a looking-glass. The 
manufacture of plate glass for 
mirrors is told about in the article 
Glass. A mirror is a sheet of 
plate glass coated on the back with 
a white metal commonly called sil¬ 
ver, but which is really an amalgam 
of MERCURY and tin foil. A large 
sheet of tin foil is spread out on a 
smooth level table of stone or of 
iron. Mercury is then poured over 
the foil until it is about a quarter of 
an inch deep, it being kept from 
running off by strips of glass placed 


along three sides of the table. The 
plate of glass, which has been care¬ 
fully cleaned, is then slid on flat 
from the open side, in such a way 
that its edge pushes off most of 
the mercury before it, leaving just 
enough on the tin foil, and keeps out 
bubbles of air. When the glass is 
in its place, the table is tipped up so 
that the mercury not needed can 
run off, heavy weights are put upon 
the glass, and it is allowed to stand 
a few hours, when it is taken up and 
set away for several weeks to dry 
thoroughly. There are other ways 
by which a film or coating of pure 
silver is put on the back of mirrors, 
but the old way is most used. 

It is not known exactly when mir¬ 
rors were first made of glass. The 
Venetians coated them with mercury 
and tin more than three hundred 
years ago, and mirrors coated with 
lead are mentioned about six hundred 
years ago. The mirrors of the an¬ 
cients were made mostly of polished 
metals, especially of bronze. They 
were usually small and round, and 
were fitted with a handle handsome¬ 
ly carved and ornamented. Many 
such hand mirrors have been found 
in Egyptian tombs. The Romans 
used silver mirrors, and at a later 
time mirrors made of a black stone 
called obsidian, polished very high¬ 
ly, and set into walls as panels. 

The Japanese still use small metal 
mirrors, much like those of the an¬ 
cients, and in their country the 
bronze mirror with its stand is 
sometimes the only furniture in a 
room. The Japanese say that when 
the sun goddess sent her adopted 
grandson (who was the great-grand¬ 
father of the first emperor of Japan) 
to conquer the world, she gave him 
three things : a precious stone, em¬ 
blem of the spirit of woman ; a 
sword, emblem of the spirit of man ; 
and a mirror, emblem of her own 
soul. “ Look,” she said, ‘‘on this 
mirror as my spirit ; keep it in the 
same house and on the same floor 
with yourself, and worship it as if 




MITRE 


397 


MOCKING BIRD 


you were worshipping me.” And 
ever since that time the Japanese 
have held it sacred, looking upon it 
in much the same way as the Chris¬ 
tian regards the cross. Women 
keep it as their most valuable posses¬ 
sion, and every bride is presented 
with two mirrors. 

The word mirror is from the 
French miroir, which is from the 
Latin mirari , to admire. 

MITRE, the joint made by the 
ends of two pieces fitted together 
at a right angle, as shown in the 
picture. The joints in the corners 
of a picture frame 
"Y* are mitre joints. 

They are usually 
/ sawn in a long box 

called a mitre-box, 
[ y \ the sides of which 

i have saw cuts 
Mitre Joint. through them at the 
right slant to guide 
the saw in cutting. 

MOCKING BIRD. The mocking 
bird is found only in North and 
South America and the West In¬ 
dies. It is plentiful in the warm 
parts of the United States, but is 
seldom seen in the Northern States. 
Its form is graceful, but its plumage 
is not very handsome. The general 
color above is ashy brown, and the 
under parts are white with a brown¬ 
ish tinge ; the legs and bill are 
black, and the wings and tail nearly 
black. But although rather homely 
in looks, it is one of the gayest and 
sprightliest of birds, and one of the 
best singers in the world. Its own 
song is very sweet and pleasing, and 
it will sing the notes of other birds 
so perfectly that one can scarcely 
tell the difference between them. It 
will also whistle tunes, and imitate 
the bark of a dog, the crow of a cock, 
the sound of a saw, the creak of a 
wheel, and other sounds ; but it can¬ 
not speak words like the parrot. It 
takes great delight in singing the 
songs of other birds, passing from 
one to another with the greatest 
ease, now warbling like a canary 


or bluebird, then cackling like a 
hen or screaming like* a swallow. 
Sportsmen are often deceived by 
hearing it cluck like the partridge or 
whistle like the quail, and other 
birds are frightened at hearing what 
sounds like the scream of a hawk, 
but which is in reality only a little 
mocking bird scarcely larger than 
themselves. Like the nightingale the 
mocking bird often sings at night, 
beginning its song when the moon 
rises. The Mexicans call it the 
“ bird of four hundred tongues.” 

The mocking bird loves to build 
its nest in gardens near houses, but 
it does not like to have any one come 
too near to it, and it will attack with 
great fierceness the face and hands 
of boys who try to rob it. The 
black snake, which is a great enemy 
of birds, is often driven away from 
their nest by mocking birds, who 
dart at its eyes with their spear-like 
beaks. The eggs, which are usually 
five, are pale green with brown 
patches and spots. Two or three 
broods are raised each year. 

Mocking birds are easily tamed 
and live very happily in cages, if 
they are caught when young. They 
should be taken from the nest when 
eight or ten days old, and fed for a 
few days on a little raw meat chop¬ 
ped fine and soaked in milk. After¬ 
ward they may be given thickened 
meal and water, or meal and milk, 
mixed now and then with minced raw 
meat. Both young and old need 
some kind of berries, such as straw¬ 
berries, huckleberries, or almost any 
kind of wild fruit. Gravel should 
be kept in the cage, and grasshop¬ 
pers, beetles, or other insects should 
be given to them now and then. 
The mocking bird makes a very 
familiar and affectionate pet, and is 
long-lived. 

The mocking bird belongs to the 
order insessores, or perching BIRDS, 
and to the thrush family, in which 
are also the American robin, and 
the CAT BIRD. 

The mocking bird gets its name 













MOLASSES 


39 8 


MOLLUSKS 


from its habit of mocking the songs 
of other birds. 

MOLASSES. See SUGAR. 

MOLE. The mole is found in 
Europe, Asia, Africa, and North 
America, but not in South America. 
The kinds are somewhat different 
in each country, but their habits are 
much the same. • 

The European Mole is five or six 
inches long, with short feet armed 
with claws, and a sharp hog-like 
nose. It is usually dark brown or 
black, and its short hairs grow 
straight out from the skin, so that 
its fur keeps smooth whether it 
moves forward or backward in its 
underground burrows, and does not 
hold dirt. Its senses of hearing and 
smell are very sharp, but its eyes 
are very small. Its food is chiefly 



earthworms and grubs, which it pur¬ 
sues underground, throwing up the 
earth in little ridges called mole 
hills. The house of the mole is very 
curious, and is always made in the 
same way. It is formed, as shown 
in the picture, of a little mound of 
earth in which are two circular gal¬ 
leries, one above the other, and 
connected by five passages. In the 
middle of the lower gallery is a round 
place where the mole makes its nest, 
in which it sleeps. This is joined 
with the upper gallery by three pas¬ 
sages, but not at all with the lower 
one. Nine or ten other passages 
run in different directions from the 
lower gallery, and into one of these 
opens a passage leading downward 
from the bottom of the nest. 


The Shrew Mole, or common mole 
of the United States, is not quite so 
large as the European mole, and is 
of a dark lead color, with white feet 
and tail. It lives usually near streams 
or in damp places. 

The Star-nosed Mole, of the north¬ 
ern parts of North America, is so 
called because the end of its nose is 
surrounded by little fleshy points, 
making it look like a star. These 
points are used as feelers. 

The mole is a mammal of the 
order insectivora , or insect-eating 
animals. 

The word mole is shortened from 
the old English mold-warp, which is 
from the Anglo-Saxon molde , mould 
or earth, and weorpen , to throw up. 

MOLLUSKS. The general nature 
of mollusks, which are soft-bodied 
animals, without any skeleton either 
inside or outside, is told about under 
Animal. They are divided into 
two classes : I. Acephalous Mol¬ 
lusks, or those without a head ; and 
II. Cephalous Mollusks, or those 
with a head. 

I. Acephalous Mollusks are di¬ 
vided into two groups : those with 
shells and those without shells. 
There are many of those without 
shells in the sea, usually found stick¬ 
ing to seaweed or to rocks, but we 
have not space to tell about them. 
Almost all the mollusks of this class 
which have shells are bivalves, that 
is, their shells are made up of two 
valves or parts, like the shells of 
oysters and clams. Among the 
principal bivalves are the oyster, 
the clam, the mussel, the scal¬ 
lop, and the shipworm. Most 
bivalves live in one place, fastened 
to rocks and other things at the bot¬ 
tom of the sea, but some can change 
their places by means of a fleshy 
kind of tongue, called a foot. The 
animal runs this out of its shell, as 
shown in the picture, fastens it to 
something by the point, and then by 
drawing it in pulls itself along. The 
two long things stretched out on 
the right are feelers. 









MOLLUSKS 


399 


MOLLUSKS 


The razor shell, a bivalve mol- 
lusk, which gets its name from its 
shape, bores into the sand with its 
foot. It can make this foot long 
and pointed like a dagger, so that 
it is easily thrust down into the sand. 
As soon as it is in, it swells out at 


the end like the clapper of a bell, 
which gives it a hold on the sand, 
and then by shortening its foot it 
draws its whole shell in quite fast. 
It can thus bury itself in a little 
while fifteen or twenty inches deep. 
Some other mollusks use their foot 



Bivalve Mollusk, with Foot out. 


to push themselves along, and others 
give little leaps by bending it up 
under them and straightening it out. 

Another family of mollusks bore 
out for themselves houses in solid 
rock. These houses are usually 



A Pholas in a Piece of Stone. 

wide at the bottom, with long nar¬ 
row necks, as shown in the pictuie, 
the mollusk scooping it out more 
and more as it grows larger. In 
this hole the pholas, as it is called, 
lives, breathing through its long 


tube, which it runs up to the mouth 
of the hole. For a long time it was 
not known how the pholas bored its 
hole, but we now know that it is done 
by the sharp edges of its shells, which 
are harder than the rock they cut. 
Sometimes the holes of boring mol¬ 
lusks are found in rocks far above 
the sea, and by this we know that 
the land in which they lie must once 
have been under the sea. At a place 
called Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples, 
are the ruins of the ancient temple 
of Jupiter Serapis, the pillars of 
which are full of holes made by mol¬ 
lusks. We know therefore that this 
temple must have been sunk in the 
sea at some time, long enough for the 
borers to do their work, and after¬ 
ward raised up again. 

Some bivalves spin a kind of silk 
from their foot, by which they an¬ 
chor themselves to the rocks. This 
silk is made in much the same way 
as the web of the spider and the 
caterpillar. There is a little bag at 
the end of the foot which gives out 
a fluid which thickens so that it may 
be drawn out into a fine thread. 

Many threads are thus spun until 
a bunch or beard is formed, by 
which the animal can anchor itself 
so tightly to a rock that it cannot 
be pulled off without breaking it. 
Some of them fasten together with 





MOLLUSKS 


400 


MOLLUSKS 


these threads stones, pieces of coral, 
and other hard things, so as to sur¬ 
round their shells with a kind of de¬ 
fence, behind which they can lie in 
safety. 

A kind of mussel called the pinna, 
found in the Mediterranean, has 
a beard so long and silky that its 
threads can be spun and woven. In 
Sicily a kind of soft cloth is some¬ 
times made of it, and in Taranto, 
Italy, they mix it with about a third 
of real silk and make gloves and 
stockings of it. 

II. Cephalous Mollusks are divided 
into three groups : 1, Cephalopods, 
or head-footed ones, in which the 
feet grow out around the head ; 2, 
Pteropods, or wing-footed ones, 
which have a pair of wing-like fins, 


by which they can swim fast; 3, 
Gasteropods, or belly-footed ones, 
which have a single broad foot un¬ 
der the body. 

1. The cephalopods have a flabby 
body and a large head, with two 
great staring eyes, one on each side ; 
and a mouth, or rather beak, bent 
like the bill of a parrot, around which 
branch out eight or ten arms or feet. 
When they walk these arms are used 
as feet. They can run very fast on 
the beach with these feet. They 
can also move backward in the 
water by squirting water out of a 
kind of funnel placed under the 
head. Cephalopods are found in the 
waters of all the oceans, some living 
in deep water and some along the 
coasts. They live on fish, shell- 



Cuttle Fish Eggs. 


fish, and other sea animals. As 
they cannot move very fast, they lie 
in ambush behind rocks or in holes, 
with their long arms ready and their 
eyes wide open, waiting for their 
prey. As soon as any animal comes 
within reach, it is seized, drawn in, 
and eaten. Their arms are furnished 
with suckers, which cling tightly to 
whatever they grasp, so that even 
slimy fish are held fast. They have 
also a kind of bag filled with an inky 
fluid, which they can squeeze into 
the water on the coming of danger, 
and by thus darkening it hide their 
movements. Cephalopods are most¬ 
ly night animals, and usually hide 
away during the day. 

Among the cephalopods are some 


with ten arms or legs, and some 
with eight. The principal ten¬ 
legged ones are the cuttle fish 
and the squid. In the Pacific Ocean 
is a kind of cuttle fish which can 
make very high leaps. They some¬ 
times jump out of the water on to 
the deck of a vessel, and some have 
been seen to jump clear over a ves¬ 
sel. Cuttle fish lay their eggs in the 
spring, and take great care of them, 
always fastening them to something 
in the water, where they are hatched 
out by the heat in about a month. 
The strong stem of some seaweed 
is generally chosen for this. The 
eggs, which are quince-shaped, have 
a black jelly-like string by which 
they are wound round the stem, as 





MOLLUSKS 


401 


MOLLUSKS 


shown in the picture. Twenty or 
thirty of these eggs are generally 
hung together in a cluster like a 
bunch of grapes, from which they 
are sometimes called sea-grapes. 

The squid is much like the cuttle 
fish in looks. The common squid, 
found on the coast of New England, 
is six to twelve inches long, but very 
large ones have been found off the 
coast of Newfoundland. In 1872 
one was seen whose body was nearly 
twice as long as a man, while its 
arms were five times as long as a 
man. It is thought that some of them 
grow to be at least fifty feet long. 


Squids make a large part of the 
food of whales, dolphins, and por¬ 
poises, and small ones are cut up 
for bait for codfish. In ancient 
times they were eaten by the Greeks 
and Romans, and they are now eaten 
by the modern Greeks during the 
long fasts of their church, when they 
are forbidden to eat either flesh or 
fish. The Chinese and the Indians 
of the Pacific coast also eat them. 

Squids, or calmars, as they are 
sometimes called, are found on the 
coast of Norway, and they probably 
gave rise to the stories of the great 
sea animal called by the old writers 



Octopus. 


the kraken, which was said to be a 
mile long and to look like an island 
when it was on the surface of the 
water. An old book gives a picture 
of a kraken drawing down into the 
sea a three-masted ship, around 
which it has wrapped its long arms ; 
and a story is told of a bishop who 
set up an altar and said mass on the 
back of a kraken lying on the shore, 
which he mistook for a rock. The 
great monster lay still until the ser¬ 
vice was done, and then ran into the 
sea, to the terror of all present. 

The principal eight-armed cephal- 
opods are the octopus or poulpe and 


the argonaut. The common octo¬ 
pus, found in the European seas, 
has a round body about as large as 
a man’s fist, with eight arms around 
it, each three or four feet long. 
Near the body these arms are joined 
by a tough skin, as shown in the 
picture, by opening and shutting 
which it can swim backward. It has 
also a tube which opens near its 
mouth, through which it blows out 
water, which helps it to swim in 
other ways. It can walk on its 
eight arms in the same way with the 
cuttle fish. In the seas of hot coun¬ 
tries the octopus grows very large. 








MOLLUSKS 


402 


MOLLUSKS 


Such ones are very strong and dan¬ 
gerous. The “ devil fish,” told 
about by Victor Hugo in his book 
called ” The Toilers of the Sea,” 
which catches a man and draws him 
down into his cave, is something 
like an octopus, but there is really 
no such animal in the world as the 
one he describes. 

The argonaut is more commonly 
called the nautilus. The ancients 
used to tell wonderful stories about 


this animal, and saw in its pretty 
shell the model of a ship, from which 
the Greeks made its name of nautilus, 
nans being the Greek word for ship. 
Pliny, the Roman writer, says it 
raises up its two first arms with a 
thin skin stretched between them for 
a sail, and rows and steers with its 
other arms. But it is now known 
that it moves like other cephalopods, 
by spouting water out through a 
tube. When it swims on the surface 



Argonaut Swimming. 


of the sea, all its eight arms are 
stretched out, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture. When frightened by any¬ 
thing, it draws itself into its shell, as 
in the next picture, and sinks to the 
bottom. Only the female argonaut 
has a shell, the male being naked 
and only about a tenth as large. 
The female lays its eggs in the 
shell, and the little ones are hatched 



Argonaut in its Shell. 


in this floating cradle. In the paper 
nautilus the shell is as thin as paper, 
but in the pearly nautilus it is thicker 
and covered with fine mother-of- 
pearl, which is much used for orna¬ 
menting furniture. In China and 
other eastern countries vases and 
drinking cups are made of pearl 
nautilus shells, which are hand¬ 
somely carved. 


2. Pteropods, or wing-footed mol- 
lusks, live in the open sea, seldom 
coming near the land, and are the 
principal food of whales and sea 
birds. We have not space to tell 
about them. 

3. Gasteropods, or belly-footed 
mollusks, are mostly those animals 
which live in a single shell, that is, 
a shell made up of only one part, 
which is called therefore a univalve. 



Tyrian Purple Mollusk. 


Most of them are found in the 
sea, but some live in fresh water 
and some on the land. The snail 
is a land gasteropod. From the sea 
gasteropods come the beautiful 
shells which we see in museums, 
or which are used for ornaments in 
houses, gardens, and grottoes. All 
these shells were once the homes of 
living animals, each of whom moved 
round on the bottom of the sea by 












MONKEY 


403 


MONKEY 


means of its single foot. From one 
of these animals came the purple 
dye of the ancients, so celebrated as 
Tyrian purple. This dye, which 
was used only for coloring the 
mantles of princes and nobles, was 
a beautiful deep violet, with some¬ 
times a reddish shade. It was made 
from the juice of a mollusk which 
lived in a little spiral or twisted shell, 
shown in the picture, found along 
the Mediterranean coast. Near the 
ruins of the ancient city of Tyre are 
still to be seen hollow places in 
rocks, in which were found broken 
shells, as if they had been pounded 
there by the ancient dyers. 

The word mollusk is from the 
Latin mollusca, which comes from 
mollis , soft. Cephalous is from the 
Greek kefthale, head. Cephalopod 
is from kephale , head, and pous, 
genitive podos, foot ; pteropod from 
pteron , wing, a.n& pous ; and gaster- 
opod from gaster, belly, and pous. 

MONKEY. Monkeys are found in 
the hot parts of America, in Asia, 
and in Africa. Apes and baboons 
are kinds of monkeys, but apes have 
no tails and baboons have only short 
tails, while monkeys have very long 
tails. Monkeys are more like man 
than any other animals, both in their 
outward form and in their skeletons, 
and they sometimes act much like 
man ; but when wild they seldom 
walk upright, preferring to go usually 
on all fours. They live mostly in 
trees, up which they climb with 
great ease, and delight in leaping 
from branch to branch, or in twist¬ 
ing their tail round a limb and swing¬ 
ing by it until they can seize hold of 
another one. Their food is mostly 
fruits, nuts, and insects. They are 
very cunning and mischievous, and 
may be taught many funny tricks. 

New World Monkeys. The mon¬ 
keys in America are unlike those of 
the Old World, having broad noses, 
while those of the Old World have 
narrow noses with the nostrils close 
together. In the forests of Brazil 
and Guiana are great troops of mon¬ 


keys called howlers, which make a 
frightful noise during the night. As 
many as thirty or forty may some¬ 
times be seen in one tree. On the 
banks of the Amazon and the Orinoco 
are often seen troops of little black 
monkeys (coaitas), commonly called 
spider monkeys, because they look 
like black spiders as they swing by 
their tails among the branches of the 
trees. The black saki is a little 
larger than the spider monkey, but 
has nearly the same habits. Its face 
is more like a man’s than that of 
any other American monkey. The 
eyes are large, its chin is covered 
with a thick beard, and it is said to 
drink out of the hollow of its hand 
so as not to wet its beard. There 
are also several kinds of monkeys in 
Brazil called marmosets, which live 
on fruits, eggs, small birds and in¬ 
sects. The silky marmoset has silky 
golden - yellow fur, which forms a 
kind of mane on the neck. The 
leonine (Latin leo , lion) marmoset is 
brown with a black face, and has a 
brown mane, which stands up when 
it is angry, like that of a lion. It is 
the smallest of all monkeys. The 
striated marmoset is gray, and has a 
long beautiful tail, marked with 
brown or gray rings. It is easily 
tamed, and makes a very interesting 
pet. 

Old World Monkeys. Among the 
monkeys of the Old World is the en- 
tellus, found in India, which kills 
snakes. When it sees a snake 
asleep, it creeps up on all fours, 
seizes it by the neck and knocks its 
head against a stone until it is dead. 
It then gives the snake to the young 
monkeys, who play with it just as 
kittens do with a mouse. The Hin¬ 
doos make a god of it, build temples 
and hospitals for it, and believe that 
whoever kills one will die within the 
year. These monkeys go into houses 
and steal things to eat, but their vis¬ 
its are thought to be a great honor. 
The proboscis monkey has a nose 
about four inches long. It lives in 
great troops in the woods in the 





MONKEY 


404 


MOON 


island of Borneo. In Africa is 
found the green monkey, which is 
olive-green on its back and whitish 
below, with a black face. It is lively 
and playful when tamed. Another 
African monkey has a brownish 
body, with blackish legs and tail, 
yellowish green on top of the head, 
and bright yellow on the cheeks. 
It is very cunning and playful. 

Monkeys may be taught a great 
many amusing tricks, and in some 
large cities in Europe are theatres 
where monkeys act much like men 
and women. In almost all circuses 
too there are usually trained monkeys 
which ride horses, jump through 
hoops and over bars, and do many 
other bright things. More than two 
hundred years ago trained monkeys 
were shown at fairs and other public 
places in England, so that they are 
by no means a new thing. 

Tame monkeys make amusing 
pets, but they are often very trouble¬ 
some, as they love to imitate their 
masters in everything they do. A 
monkey once cut his throat in trying 
to shave as he had seen his master 
shave himself. Monkeys do not like 
to be cheated, and will fly into a rage 
if any trick is played upon them. A 
lady once brought a bright little 
monkey with her from India. He 
was a great pet on board the ship, 
and used to take much delight in hav¬ 
ing a frolic with his mistress. But 
one day she carried a looking glass 
on deck and called Jocko to come 
and look in it. He was much 
pleased when he saw his form in it, 
and jabbered at it and made faces 
at it in the most excited manner, for 
he supposed it was another monkey; 
but when he put his paw around to 
feel the back of it, he found that 
there was no other monkey there. 
He thought his mistress had tried 
to cheat him ; he flew into a terrible 
passion, and she had to run to save 
herself from a scratching. He never 
forgot it, and she could never again 
make friends with him. 

Everybody has heard the story of 


the monkey which used the cat’s paw 
to draw the hot chestnuts from the 
fire, but this is beaten by a monkey 
story which comes from South 
Africa. The monkeys trouble the 
coffee-planters there very much by 
running over their fields in search 
of the fruit of a shrub which grows 
among the coffee plants, and which 
they love very much. On one of 
these coffee plantations some wasps 
had built their nests among these 
shrubs, and though the monkeys had 
often been seen looking eagerly at 
the fruit, none of them had ever 
dared touch it for fear of being 
stung. One morning the planter 
heard terrible cries, and turning his 
spy-glass toward the place saw a 
curious sight. A fat old monkey 
was catching the young ones and 
throwing them one by one into the 
bushes. The shock brought down 
the wasps’ nests, and the wasps flew 
upon and stung the young ones, who 
were crying and groaning with pain 
while the old rogue quietly ate the 
fruit. 

The monkey is a mammal of the 
order quadrumana , or four-handed 
animals. 

The word monkey is supposed to 
be from the. Old Italian monicchio, a 
monkey, which is from inonna , an old 
woman ; so the animal is so called 
because it looks like an old woman. 

MOON. In the article Universe 
it is told that several of the planets, 
including the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, 
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, have 
one or more satellites, or moons, 
which are all the time rolling round 
them while they roll round the SUN. 
The moon which attends our earth 
is, next after the sun, the most in¬ 
teresting of all the heavenly bodies, 
because she is nearer to us than any 
other. She looks to be about as 
large as the sun, but she is really 
many million times smaller, and 
looks as large only because she is so 
much nearer, being only about a 
quarter of a million miles away (238,- 
818 miles). 






MOON 


405 


MOON 


The moon rolls round the earth 
in a little less than a month, or 
about thirteen times every year. 
Though she sheds light on the earth, 
she does not give any herself, but 
only reflects on us a part of the light 
of the sun, which shines on her as 
she moves in her orbit (see Uni¬ 
verse). The earth does the same 



Fig. 1.—Different Positions of the Moon. 


for the moon. If you could stand 
on the moon, you would see the 
earth hanging like a balloon in the 
heavens, and shining with a silvery 
light, just as the moon looks to us at 
night. It would be sometimes cres¬ 
cent-shaped and sometimes round, 
just as the moon is, but it would be 
about thirteen times as large as the 
moon. 


the sun shines on is seen. When it 
reaches c we see half the part shone 
on ; when at d we see rather more 
than half, and it is then called gib¬ 
bous (Latin gibbus , hump-backed, 
meaning that she is swelled out and 
nearly full) ; when at e we see the 
whole, and it is then said to be full ; 
when at/ it is gibbous again, and at 
g half moon. The 
moon is said to be 
eclipsed when it gets 
into the shadow of the 
earth, as shown in 
Fig. 2. In this S is 
the sun, E the earth, 
and M the moon. As 
the sun shines upon 
the earth, it makes a 
dark shadow behind 
it, and when the moon 
happens to get into 
this shadow, it can get 
no light from the sun, 
and no one on the 
earth can see it until 
it comes out of the 
shadow. While in the 
shadow it is said to be in eclipse. 
You may think, since the earth is 
all the time rolling round the sun, 
and the moon all the time round 
the earth, that the earth ought to 
come between the sun and the 
moon once every month, and that 
there ought to be therefore an eclipse 
of the moon every month. This 



The reason why we do 
not see all the moon but 
only a part of it, much of the 
time, is shown in the picture. 

In this E is the earth, a be 
de f g h the moon in differ¬ 
ent positions, and S the sun. 

When the moon is at a we 
cannot see any part of it, because 
it is between the earth and the sun, 
and the sun shines only on the side 
of the moon which is toward itself. 
When the moon moves toward b we 
begin to see it, at first like a little 
sickle in the heavens, and when it 
reaches b a whole fourth of the part 


Fig 2.—Eclipse of the Moon. 

would happen if the path or orbit of 
the moon around the earth were in 
the same direction as the orbit of the 
earth round the sun ; but it is really 
a little slanted toward it, so that 
sometimes the moon is above the 
orbit of the earth round the sun and 
sometimes below it. It is only when 






MOON 


406 


MORTAR 


the sun, earth, and moon come into 
a straight line, one behind the other, 
that the moon is eclipsed. The 
moon also makes eclipses of the SUN 
when she comes between the sun 
and the earth. 

When we look at the moon with 
the naked eye its face appears to be 
mottled, some parts being light and 
others dark. When we look at it 
through a telescope, the surface is 
seen to be covered with mountains, 
valleys, and plains, much like the 
surface of the earth, but with this 
difference : everything in the moon 
is barren and desolate, like the coun¬ 
try around volcanoes on the earth, 
and there are no seas, lakes, nor 
rivers. Indeed, most people think 
there is no water at all in the moon ; 
therefore, there can be no clouds to 
shade it from the sun, and no dew or 
rain to water it. It is also thought 
that there is no AIR around it, and 
so that no SOUND can be heard there. 

Many photographs of the moon 
have been made by means of tele¬ 
scopes, and very good maps of her 
surface have also been drawn, on 
which the mountains and plains are 
named just as on maps of the earth. 
Some dark places on these maps are 
named seas, because the ancients 
supposed them to be water, but they 
are now known to be dry land. 

Some of the mountains in the 
moon are in long ranges, and others 
rise like cones to a great height from 
level plains. Some of these moun¬ 
tains look much higher than any on 
the earth. There are also many 
high round ridges with level places 
inside them, from the middle of 
each of which a cone-shaped moun¬ 
tain rises. These look like great 
caverns or pits, with steep walls, 
often many thousand feet high. The 
floor of one of them is strewn with 
great blocks, and everything about 
them is rugged and desolate. But 
pictures of the moon taken at differ¬ 
ent times are not all alike, so it is 
thought that some changes are going 
on in it. 


In looking at the moon we always 
see the same things, therefore it is 
known that we can see only one side 
of her, the other side being always 
turned from us. As she rolls round 
the earth once every month, she 
herself must also turn round once in 
just the same time, or else we should 
be able to see all sides of her. You 
will understand this if you place your 
hands on a post and go round it, 
keeping your face toward the post 
all the time. You will see that you 
yourself turn round once each time 
you go round the post. So the moon 
turns round once each time that she 
rolls round the earth and thus always 
keeps the same face toward us. As 
the turning round of the EARTH 
makes the day on the earth, so the 
turning round of the moon makes 
the day in the moon ; and as it takes 
the moon nearly a month to turn 
round once, so its days are each 
nearly a month long—that is, the 
sun shines there for about fourteen 
of our days, and then it is dark for 
about the same length of time. 

The word moon is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon mona , moon. 

MOOSE. See Elk. 

MOROCCO. See Leather. 

MORTAR, a kind of cement put 
between stones and bricks to fasten 
them together. It is made mostly 
of slaked lime, or lime which has 
been mixed with water, and sand. 
Cow-hair is sometimes put into it 
to hold it together when it is laid 
thickly or in a mass. Mortar is mixed 
thoroughly so as to form a smooth 
paste, which is spread with a trowel 
so as to fill up all the joints between 
stones and bricks laid in it. In time 
it becomes almost as hard as the 
stones themselves. The reason of 
its hardening is that the lime in it 
takes up carbonic acid from the 
air and forms carbonate of lime 
(calcium carbonate), which partly 
unites with the silica (see SILICON) 
of the sand, thus making a kind of 
stone. Mortar is also used for the 
first coating of plaster walls, but 







MORTISE 


407 


MOSQUITO 


more hair is mixed with it than with 
mortar for brick and stone work, 
because this makes it hold on to 
the laths better. See Cement. 

The word mortar is from the 
Latin mortarium , meaning anything 
crushed or ground, the things out 
of which mortar is made being some¬ 
times ground fine. 

MORTISE, a place cut into a 
beam, to hold the end of another 
beam, made to fit it, called a tenon. 
In the picture, M shows the mortise 
and T the tenon. 
When the tenon is 
put into the mortise, 
a wooden peg is 
usually driven 
through both, which 
keeps the tenon in 
place so that it can¬ 
not be pulled out. 
This kind of joint is 



Mortise and 
Tenon. 


much used by house carpenters in 
putting together the frames of 
houses, and in making doors, shut¬ 
ters, and blinds. Most of the locks 
on doors are fitted into mortises. 

The word mortise is in French 


mortaise , which is probably from 
the Latin mordere, to bite or hold 
fast. Tenon is in French tenon , 
and is from the Latin tenere, to hold. 

MOSAIC, a kind of inlaid work 
made by fitting together little pieces 
of stone or glass of different colors 
so as to form a picture. There are 
two kinds of mosaic, called usually 
Roman and Florentine, from the 
cities of Rome and Florence, where 


they are chiefly made. 

Roman Mosaics are pictures made 
up of little pieces of colored glass 
called smalti or smalts. The smalts 
are made in long slender rods of 
many thousands of different colors 
and shades, and are cut up into 
pieces of the sizes wanted. Large 
pictures are made of mosaics. A 
space of the size of the picture to 
be made is cut into a slab of stone, 
the bottom of it is covered with a 
kind of cement, and into this are 
stuck the little pieces which make 


up the picture. When all are set 
up the top is polished smooth, and 
the mosaic looks, at a little distance, 
much like an oil painting. 

Florentine Mosaics are made only 
of real stones and pieces of shell in¬ 
stead of colored glass, and are most¬ 
ly imitations of flowers, birds, in¬ 
sects, and other small things. They 
are made by inlaying little pieces of 
agate, jasper, carnelian, MALA¬ 
CHITE, and other stones. The 
pieces are polished before they are 
put into place, because, as some of 
the stones are much softer than 
others, they cannot be polished after 
the work is done. Great care is 
necessary, therefore, to fit them into 
their right places. 

The word mosaic is from the new 
Latin mosaicum (opus), mosaic work, 
probably from the Greek inouseios, 
belonging to the Muses, and there¬ 
fore something well made. 

MOSQUITO. There are several 
kinds of mosquitoes or gnats, and 
some of them are found almost 
everywhere, in the coldest as well as 
in the hottest countries. Those 
which live in swamps and woods 



Head of Mosquito, showing Proboscis and 
Feelers. 

are active only in the daytime, while 
house mosquitoes fly only by night, 
but all of them suck the blood of 
men and of animals. The bite of 
mosquitoes is really a sting, for in¬ 
stead of jaws they have a long hoi- 












MOSQUITO 


408 


MOTH 


low proboscis, or sucker, with sev¬ 
eral little bristles or lancets in it, 
sharper than the finest needle. 
These bristles prick through the 
skin, and the insect then draws up 
the blood through the proboscis. 
At the same time a poisonous juice 
is squirted into the wound, which 
causes a great itching and sometimes 
makes a bad sore. The picture 
shows the proboscis of a mosquito, 
with the feelers around it, as seen 
in a microscope. Male mosquitoes 
feed mostly on the juices of flowers, 
and do not sting human beings ; the 
females are the ones whose music 
we hear at night and whose stings 
are so troublesome. 

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in still, 
fresh water, in ponds, cisterns, and 
ditches. Each female lays three 
hundred or more EGGS, which are 
formed like a little boat, and stuck to¬ 
gether with a sort of glue. The boat, 
which is always of the same shape, 
is left to drift, the mother taking no 
further care of it. In a few days the 
larvas (see Insects) crawl out at the 
bottom of the eggs and become what 
are called ‘ ‘ wigglers. ’ ’ After about 
two weeks, during which they 
change their skins several times, 
they become pupae, sometimes called 
“tumblers,” because they tumble 
over and over in the water. In about 
ten days more the skin of the pupa 
opens on the back and the mosquito 
comes out. Many broods of mos¬ 
quitoes are hatched every season, but 
great numbers of the pupae are eaten 
by fishes and birds, or drowned in 
trying to get out of their cases. After 
the pupae become full-grown mos¬ 
quitoes also, thousands of them are 
eaten by other insects and by insect 
eating birds. If it were not for this 
they would be a far worse pest than 
they now are. 

The mosquito belongs to the or¬ 
der diptera, or two-winged insects, 
and to the gnat family. 

The word mosquito is Spanish, 
and is from the Spanish mosca, Lat¬ 
in musea , a fly. 


MOSSES. These interesting 
plants have stems and leaves, and 
also something which answers for 
flowers and seed-vessels, but they 
are very simple and not much like 
those of the higher plants. None of 
the mosses are large, and many of 
them are very small. They grow 
better and in greater numbers in cool 
than in hot climates, and many are 
found on high mountain tops and 
far up in the Arctic regions. Next 
after the lichens, they are among 
the first plants which begin to cover 
rocks and bare places. They love 
dampness and often grow in bogs 
and swamps, which they slowly fill 
up. Trees, stone walls, and ruins 
are covered and made beautiful by 
them, and the shady banks of brooks 
are clothed by them with a green 
carpet as soft as velvet. By collect¬ 
ing sand and earth in their thick 
mat, mosses form a soil for other 
plants. They also cover and pro¬ 
tect the roots of other plants in win¬ 
ter, and make lodging places and 
food for insects. 

Mosses are used to pack trees and 
plants, for littering cattle, and in 
some places for stuffing pillows and 
mattresses. Several kinds give food 
to cattle in cold countries, and even 
a poor quality of bread is sometimes 
made from mosses in the Arctic re¬ 
gions. 

Mosses belong to the sub-kingdom 
of flowerless plants, of which they 
form the second class. 

The word moss is from the Latin 
muscuSy plural inusci , moss. 

MOTH, an insect belonging to the 
same family with the butterfly, 
but which generally flies by night. 
There are many different kinds of 
moths, and they vary greatly in size, 
form, and color. The owl moth of 
Brazil measures eleven inches across 
the wings, while others are less than 
half an inch. Some kinds are very- 
beautiful, but they are not so hand¬ 
some as the butterflies. When at 
rest they do not hold their wings up 
like the butterflies, but have them 




MOTH 


409 


MOTHER OF PEARL 


usually flat or hanging down a little ; 
and some of the smaller moths wrap 
them around the body. Moths pass 
through three changes of life in the 
same way with the butterflies (see 
Caterpillar). 

The Hawk Moth, which is among 
the largest of common moths, is so 
called from its swift and strong 
flight. It is sometimes called hum¬ 
ming-bird moth, because it makes a 
noise in flying something like that of 
the humming-bird. In France chil¬ 
dren call it the bird-fly. Many hawk 
moths are so large and of such 
bright colors that they might easily 
be mistaken for birds as they fly 
from flower to flower in the dusk of 


evening. They sometimes light, but 
generally sip honey with their long 
proboscis or tongue while hovering 
over flowers. One of the pictures 
shows the form of one kind of hawk 



Cocoon of Hawk Moth. 

moth, and the other picture the 
shape of the cocoon or chrysalis 
(see Insect) in which its pupa 
changes into a moth. The silk¬ 
worm, which is a kind of moth, is 
told about under its own title. 



Hawk 

The Clothes Moth, the larva of 
which eats clothing, carpets, and 
furs, is among the smallest of the 
moths. It is of a light buff color, 
the hind wings being nearly white, 
and its head is covered with little 
hairs. This moth, which begins to 
fly about in May, lays its eggs in 
woollens, on which the young feed. 
The larvas are smooth and nearly 
white, and have sixteen legs. When 
ready to become pupae, they make 
themselves little cases out of the 
cloth they eat, and fasten them to¬ 
gether with silk which they spin. In 
these cases they live until they 
change into moths. There are other 
kinds which eat grain, fruits, and 
trees. 


Moth 

The moth belongs to the order lep - 
zdoptera, or scale-winged insects. 

The word moth is from the Anglo- 
Saxon mogdhe , moth. 

MOTHER OF PEARL, the silvery 
substance, called nacre, with which 
the inside of many shells is lined. 
The most mother of pearl is got 
from the shells of the pearl oyster, 
and great quantities of them are 
brought every year from the East 
Indies, South America, and the Pa¬ 
cific islands, to be manufactured 
into knife handles, shirt buttons, 
and studs and ornaments. Much of 
it is also used in inlaying furniture 
and other cabinet work, and for or¬ 
namenting papier-mache. Mother 
of pearl is made by the oyster in the 











MOUSE 


410 


MULE 


same way in which pearls are made. 
When manufactured the shells are 
sawed up into the right sizes and 
shapes, and then ground on grind¬ 
stones and polished. 

In the conch shell the nacre is 
pink, and beautiful jewelry is often 
made of it. The pink pearl is found 
in this shell. 

MOUSE. The common house 
mouse came first from Europe and 
Asia, but is now found almost all 
over America. It is generally slate 
color, but is sometimes black and 
sometimes pure white. The white 
ones are albinos, and do not differ 
from the others excepting in color. 
Singing mice are also like other mice, 
but make a faint noise something 
like the chirp of a bird. The mouse 
often does much mischief in our 
houses, but it is a timid and harm¬ 
less little animal, and should not be 
a cause of fright to any one. 

The Deer Mouse, which has a yel¬ 
lowish-brown back and white breast 
and feet, is also commonly found in 
houses and barns in the Northern 
United States, and often in trees, 
making a nest like that of a bird. It 
lives on grain and nuts, and is fond 
of Indian corn, but does not do 
much harm to the farmer. 

The Meadow Mouse, sometimes 
called the field mouse, is larger and 
more clumsy in form than other 
mice, and lives in burrows in the 
ground, where it lays up a store of 
food for the winter. It never climbs 
trees, like the deer mouse, but does 
much harm by gnawing their bark, 
and also by eating fruit and grain. 

The mouse is a mammal of the 
order rodentia , or gnawing animals, 
and of the same family with the RAT. 

The word mouse is from the Latin 
mus, mouse. 

MULBERRY, a kind of tree on 
the leaves of which silkworms are 
fed. There are several sorts, and 
silkworms will eat the leaves of all 
of them, but the one which causes 
them to make the finest and best 
silk is the white mulberry, which 


was first brought from China. It 
bears a yellowish-white fruit which 
is good to eat, but is not nearly so 
good as the fruit of the black mul¬ 
berry, which grows in southern 
Europe and in the United States 
south of New England. The paper 
mulberry grows wild in China, Ja¬ 
pan, and the Pacific islands. The 
Japanese and Chinese make paper 
from the bark of its young shoots. 
The thin, silky, yellow paper in 
which tea is packed is mulberry 
paper. The South Sea Islanders 
make a kind of cloth, called ta ftp a or 
kafta, by beating thin sheets of the 
bark with mallets. It looks much 
like unbleached cotton cloth at first; 
but they often stamp it with very 
pretty colored figures. The thin 
paper called India paper, used by 
engravers for taking fine proofs of 
pictures, is also made of the bark of 
this tree. 

The word mulberry is from the 
Anglo-Saxon murberie, which is 
from the Latin morns, the mulberry 
tree. 

MULE, an animal, part ASS and 
part horse. The parents of a 
mule are always a male ass and a 
mare ; the offspring of a male horse 
and a female ass is called a hinny. 
The mule has the head,, ears, and 
tail of the ass, but in size and height 
is more like the horse. It is noted 
for being very sure-footed, and is 
therefore of great value for travelling 
in mountainous countries ; and it is 
quicker-witted and can endure more 
than the horse. In ancient times 
mules were much used for riding, 
and they still are ridden in Spain, 
South America, and Africa. In Italy 
and Spain they are also driven in 
carriages. In South America long 
trams of loaded mules travel over 
the mountains, in single file, each 
train led by an old mare, called the 
madrina or godmother, which has a 
bell hung round her neck. The 
mules all know the sound of their 
own bell, and when several trains 
are mixed together, as they some- 




MUSCLE 


MUSCLE 


411 


times are at halting places, the 
different trains will all separate and 
follow each its own mare when the 
time comes to move again. Mules 
are largely raised in the Southern 
States for work on plantations. 

The word mule is from the Latin 
rnulus , mule. 

MUSCLE. In the article Man it 
is said that the flesh is rightly called 
muscle. The meat of all animals is 
made up of muscles, with generally 
a little fat, but they are not of the 
same color in all animals. In beef 
and mutton they are deep red, in 
the meat of a rabbit lighter red, and 
in most of the meat of fowls nearly 
white. 

Every movement of the body is 
made by muscles. They move the 
bones, so that we are able to walk, 
run, and leap, and to strike and 
grasp anything, and they also move 
the tongue, the eyes and eyelids, and 
other parts of the face, and all the 
inner parts of the body, such as the 
heart and the stomach. Muscles 
are bundles of soft thread-like 
strings, all running in one way, 
which have the power of shortening 
and lengthening themselves. At 
each end they are joined on to harder 
and thinner parts, called tendons, 
by means of which they are fastened 
on to the bones or to some of the 
other firm parts of the body. The 
tendons are sometimes round like a 
cord, and sometimes flat and spread 
out, but they are always firmer, thin¬ 
ner, and more slender than the mid¬ 
dle of the muscle. The tendons are 
always the same and do not shorten 
any, but the soft part of every 
muscle can suddenly shorten itself, 
and as quickly become long again. 
When it thus shortens itself it be¬ 
comes thicker, and when it lengthens 
again it gets thin once more, just as 
a piece of India-rubber grows thin 
when it is stretched. 

The muscles of the arms and legs 
are among those best known to us. 
If you bend your forearm up toward 
the shoulder, and at the same time 


put your other hand on your upper 
arm, you will feel the muscle thicken 
and grow harder. As it also short¬ 
ens as it thickens, you will see that 
it is this which pulls up the arm. If 
you now stretch your arm out straight 
you will feel the muscle go down un¬ 
til it becomes thin again. There are 
other muscles in the arm, one of 
which, under the upper arm, helps 
to pull down the forearm when it is 
bent, but the large muscle which 
you feel on the front of the upper 
arm is the principal one. This is 
called the biceps (Latin bis, twice, 
and caput , head) or two-headed 
muscle, because its upper part ends 
in two tendons, other muscles hav¬ 
ing only one. 

The forearm also is full of large 
muscles, most of those which move 
the hands and the fingers being 
there. If you open and shut your 
hand you can feel them work. 
There are no muscles in the wrist: 
it is filled with tendons which are 
fastened to the muscles above. 
You can feel some of these in your 
wrist, and others on the back of your 
hand. There are only a few small 
muscles in the hands, by means of 
which the fingers are spread out and 
brought together again. The mus¬ 
cles which do the hard work of the 
hand are in the forearm, where 
there is plenty of room for them, 
and they move the hand and fingers 
through the tendons which join them 
to them. The muscles which move 
the feet and toes are up in the leg, 
and do their work also through ten¬ 
dons, which go down through the 
ankle. 

Some muscles, such as those of 
the arms and legs, can be moved at 
our pleasure ; others, such as those 
of the throat, which are set in mo¬ 
tion when we swallow, are some¬ 
times moved by our will and some¬ 
times not ; and still others, like 
those which move the heart, act in¬ 
dependently of us, that is, they 
move of themselves without any 
help from us. But, with only a 




MUSCLE 


412 


MUSKRAT 


few exceptions, most of the mus¬ 
cles can be moved by us at our 
will. We will to move our arm 
and we move it, the muscles short¬ 
ening and lengthening as we choose. 
But how do the muscles know that 
we wish them to shorten or length¬ 
en ? Each one has many little soft 
white threads called nerves scat¬ 
tered through it, which join it to the 
brain, so that when the mind wills 
that the muscle should act, it sends 
it a message and the muscle at once 
obeys. 

It takes a great many muscles to 
make all the movements of the body. 
There are in all more than five hun¬ 
dred (527), of which all but five are 
in pairs. When we put into motion 
those muscles which we can move at 
will, we commonly call it taking ex¬ 
ercise. Exercise not only tends to 
keep the body in a state of health, 
but it also enlarges and strengthens 
the muscles and makes them better 
able to do their work. The size and 
strength of the laborer comes from 
the use of his muscles, and a like 
fulness and force can be gained by 
anybody by a like exercise. Fat 
people are full and round in body, 
but they have little strength. They 
have thus a great weight to carry 
and little to carry it with. Fat 
comes from over-feeding and little 
exercise, and should be got rid of, if 
possible, by dieting and a proper use 
of the muscles. 

The muscles of many of the lower 
animals are much more powerful 
than those of man. The muscular 
strength of insects is seen in the 
wonderful leap of the flea and the 
cricket, the power of beetles and 
ants to carry great weights, and of 
bees to fly great distances. Birds 
that fly high and swiftly have very 
strong muscles to work their wings. 
Fishes too have great muscular 
power, or they could not move 
so swiftly through the water. The 
strength of the elephant and the 
ox, the spring of the lion and the 
tiger, the speed of the antelope 


and the ostrich, the leap of the 
frog, the kangaroo, and the hare, 
and the squeezing powers of the 
boa constrictor and some other 
serpents, are all instances of mus¬ 
cular force much greater than that 
of man. 

The word muscle is from the Lat¬ 
in musatlus, a muscle. 

MUSK, a perfume obtained from 
the musk deer. This deer, which 
has no horns and differs in some 
other things from other deer, lives 
in the mountainous parts of central 
Asia. The musk is a soft reddish- 
brown ointment, which grows in a 
small bag between the hinder legs of 
the male deer. When the deer is 
killed the musk bag is cut off and 
dried with the musk inside. Grain 
musk is a coarse brown powder gath¬ 
ered from stones, trees, etc., on 
which it has been rubbed off by the 
animal. Musk is one of the strong¬ 
est of all perfumes, and is much used 
by perfumers. Other animals, such 
as the musk ox, muskrat, and musk 
duck, smell of musk, and a drove of 
pigs will often leave the smell behind 
them, but none but the musk deer 
gives the perfume. A kind of false 
musk is sometimes made out of 
AMBER. 

The musk deer is a mammal of 
the order ruminantia , or cud-chew¬ 
ing animals. 

The word musk is from the Greek 
moschos , musk. 

MUSKET. See Rifle. 

MUSKRAT, a small animal found 
only in America. It is sometimes 
called also musquash and musk 
beaver. Its body is shaped like that 
of a rat, but is about the size of a 
rabbit, and is covered with thick, 
reddish-brown fur. It has small 
ears and eyes, a long tail, and short 
legs, with four toes on the front feet 
and five on the hinder ones. All the 
toes are partly webbed, that is, they 
are joined by a skin between them 
so as to aid them in swimming. 
Though awkward on land the musk¬ 
rat is a very lively and playful animal 




MUSKRAT 


4i3 


MUSSEL 


in the water, and can swim and dive 
with great ease. 

Muskrats live near streams or 
lakes, in the banks of which they 
usually dig holes, but on marshy 
lands they sometimes build houses 
like those of the beaver. The open¬ 
ings of their burrows or holes are 
made under water, and they then 
lead upward until they reach dry 
ground above the reach of high 
water and freshets. Sometimes 
these burrows are forty to fifty feet 
long, and they make comfortable 
nests in them out of dried grass, 
leaves, and rushes, large enough for 
several of them to sleep in. 

Muskrats live mostly on grasses, 
roots, mussels, and fruits, but they 
will eat almost anything. Great 
numbers of them are killed and eaten 
by foxes, lynxes, and owls, and 
many are caught in traps and in 
other ways for their furs. They are 
caught in winter by trappers in a 
curious way. These animals often 
swim great distances under ice. 
They take in a long breath at start¬ 
ing, and then swim as far as they 
can. When they have used up all 
the OXYGEN in the air in their lungs 
they come up and breathe out the 
air, which bubbles up against the 
underside of the ice. The bubbles 
take up oxygen again from the water 
and the ice, and the muskrats 
breathe it in and then go on until 
they need more, when they do the 
same thing. In this way they can 
travel a long time in the water un¬ 
der ice. When the ice is clear they 
can be seen swimming below. The 
trapper follows until he sees one 
come up to renew its breath, and, 
before it has time to take in its air 
again, strikes the ice with a hatchet 
directly over it, scattering the air 
bubbles and driving the muskrat 
away. As it can get no more 
air, it soon drowns, and the trap¬ 
per cuts a hole through the ice 
and takes it out. Muskrat fur was 
once much used in making felt 
hats, but now it is mostly made 


into cheap furs. The furriers call 
it “ river sable.” 

The muskrat is a mammal of the 
order rodentia, or gnawing animals, 
and of the rat family. 

The muskrat is so called because 
it smells of MUSK. Its Indian name 
is musquash. 

MUSLIN, a fine kind of cotton 
cloth. Muslin is not woven so 
closely as common cotton cloth, so 
that it is thinner and more like 
gauze. The finest muslins used to 
be made in India, and they were of 
such wonderful fineness that they 
were often spoken of as “ woven 
wind but European muslins, 
made by machinery, have now taken 
their place, though they are not so 
soft and delicate as the Indian hand 
made ones. Printed muslins are 
made in the same way as calico. 
The best are made in France, Great 
Britain, and the United States. A 
cloth made of half wool and half cot¬ 
ton, and afterward printed in colors, 
is called by the French moiisselme de 
laine (wool muslin). 

The word muslin is from the 
French mousseline, named from 
Moussul or Mosul, in Asiatic Tur¬ 
key, where this cloth was first made. 

MUSSEL, a small shell-fish, some¬ 
thing like a clam but smaller, having 
a nearly three-cornered shell, green¬ 
ish black on the outside and pur¬ 
plish white inside. Mussels are found 
both in salt and in fresh water. The 
common salt-water mussel has a 
yellow meat, which is much eaten in 
Europe, both raw and cooked. As 
it is cheaper than the oyster, it is 
often called the poor man’s oyster. 
There are vast beds of mussels on 
the Atlantic coast of France, near 
Rochelle, and thousands of people 
are employed in gathering them. 
The mud flats where they grow, 
which are called bouchots , or parks, 
are covered with rows of tall posts 
twisted full of wicker-work, on which 
the mussels fasten themselves. 
Sometimes these rows are two or 
three miles long. As the flats are 




MUSSEL 


414 


MYRRH 


covered by the sea at every tide, the 
mud after the water has left it is too 
soft to bear the weight of a man, so 
the fishermen, or boucholeurs , have 
little flat - bottomed boats, called 
aeons , with which they slide over the 
mud, as shown in the picture. Only 
one knee is put into the aeon, the 
fisherman pushing it along with the 
other foot, by which means it is 
made to go quite fast. The mussels 
have to be moved three or four times 
before they are ready for market. 
Mussels are sometimes eaten in this 
country, and they are also used for 
fish bait. 

Fresh-water mussels are found in 
many rivers and streams in the 


United States. Several kinds have 
pearls in them, and some very fine 
ones were once found in New Jersey, 
one of which was sold for $2200. 
This set a great many people to look¬ 
ing for mussel pearls, and much 
time was wasted in the search which 
might have been better spent. 
Fresh-water mussels are seldom eat¬ 
en, but they make good fish bait. 

The mussel is a mollusk. 

The word mussel is from the Lat¬ 
in musculus, a mussel. 

MUSTARD, a seasoning made of 
the bruised seeds of the mustard 
plant. The mustard shrub, which 
was brought to this country from 
Europe, is an annual plant, about 



Boucholeur 

two feet high, with sweet-smelling 
yellow flowers, and seeds in little 
pods. There are two kinds, white 
mustard, which bears yellow seeds, 
and black mustard, which has black 
seeds. Both kinds of seeds are 
used for making table mustard. 
They are first ground in a mill, then 
bruised in a mortar, and finally 
sifted to get out the husks, from 
which a kind of oil is afterward 
pressed. Sometimes the husks are 
used to mix with black pepper. 
Mustard is much used in medicine, 
being given as an emetic to produce 
vomiting, in cases of poisoning ; it 
is also put on the skin in the form 
of a plaster, and is so heating and 


in his Aeon. 

irritating that if left on too long it 
will make a blister. In the United 
States mustard to be used on the 
table is usually mixed with water or 
vinegar and a little salt; but the 
French cook it and flavor it with 
various things, such as garlic, cloves, 
and celery seed. 

The word mustard is from the Old 
French moustarde , which is from 
the Latin mustum , must or sweet 
wine which has not worked, with 
which mustard was mixed. 

MYRRH, a pleasant smelling gum 
resin, with a sharp bitter taste, 
brought chiefly from Arabia and 
Abyssinia. It is the hardened juice 
of several kinds of shrubs or small 
















MYRTLE 


4i5 


MYRTLE 


trees which grow in those countries, 
and is at first light yellow, but when 
dry, reddish brown. It is used in 
medicine as atonic, to dress wounds 
that are slow in healing, and as a 
tooth powder to rub the gums with 
when they are spongy or sore. 

The word myrrh is from the Latin 
myrrha , which is from the Arabic 
inurr , bitter. 

MYRTLE. The common myrtle 
of Europe is a shrub which some¬ 
times grows three times as high as 
a man. It has bright shining leaves, 
and bears single white or pink flow¬ 
ers, and black berries. In ancient 
times this plant was sacred to Venus, 
and her temples were surrounded by 
groves of it. The victors in the 


Olympic games were crowned with 
wreaths of its leaves. Its buds and 
berries were also used to- flavor food, 
and as a medicine. At the present 
day the myrtle is used mostly as a 
perfume. Its leaves mixed with 
other things are made into sachet 
powders, and a strong-smelling 
water, called eau d'ange, is dis¬ 
tilled (see Alcohol) from its flow¬ 
ers. Bay rum is made from the 
leaves of a kind of myrtle which 
grows in the West Indies. 

The running plant commonly 
called myrtle in the United States is 
not a true myrtle, but is rightly 
named periwinkle. 

The word myrtle is from the Latin 
myrtus, myrtle. 




N 


NAIL. Nails are usually divided 
into cut nails, so called because they 
are cut out of iron plates, and 
wrought nails, which are made from 
wrought iron. Different kinds are 
named from their uses, shape, etc., 
as shingle, clapboard, floor, horse¬ 
shoe, trunk, and harness nails, and 
tacks, brads, and spikes. Some are 
called also four-penny, six-penny, 
eight-penny, and ten-penny nails. 
The word penny, thus used, is sup¬ 
posed to have been changed from 
pound. A six-pound nail was one 
of which it took a thousand to make 
six pounds, an eight-pound nail one 
of which it took a thousand to make 
eight pounds, etc. So a six-pound 
nail, pronounced “ sixpun-nail,” 
soon came to be called a six-penny 
nail, and the same with the other 
sizes. 

Before the present century almost 
all nails were made by hand, but 
now all kinds are made by machines, 
the best of which were first built in 
the United States. For making cut 
nails the iron is first rolled into 
plates of the thickness and a little 
wider than the length of the nail to 
be made. A plate is then put into 
the machine, and the dies or cutters 
cut off a tapering blank from its 
end. This blank is then seized and 
held tight by iron jaws, while a 
punch strikes the larger end and 
makes the head. The nail then 
drops out of the machine, and the 
plate moves up under the cutters and 
another tapering blank is cut, the 
wide part being this time on the other 
side, so that there shall be no waste 


in cutting up the whole plate. In 
this way the head of every other nail 
is made on the side of the plate op¬ 
posite to that on which the head of 
the one before was made. 

Wrought nails, such as horseshoe 
nails, and others, are also made 
now almost entirely by machinery. 
Shoe nails are small spike-shaped 
nails without heads ; the smaller 
kinds are cut out of zinc plates, and 
the larger ones from iron plates. 
Many kinds of ornamental nails, 
such as picture nails for hanging up 
pictures, coffin nails, and furniture 
nails, are now made with wrought- 
iron shanks and porcelain or metal 
heads. 

The word nail is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ncegel , nail. 

NANKEEN, a yellowish or buff- 
colored cotton cloth. The best is 
brought from China, where it is 
made out of a kind of yellow cotton, 
which grows near Nankin. Some 
nankeens are made in England, but 
they are dyed yellow, instead of be¬ 
ing made of cotton which grows of 
that color, and they are apt to fade. 

Nankeen is named from Nankin, 
China, where it was first made. 

NEEDLE. The sewing needle 
looks like a very simple little thing, 
yet each one that is made passes 
through the hands of nearly one 
hundred workmen. Needles are 
made out of fine steel wire, which 
comes rolled up in coils. The 
needle maker cuts the wire into 
small pieces called blanks, each of 
which is as long as two needles. As 
these blanks are cut from coiled wire 


416 




NEEDLE 


4 i 7 


NEEDLE 


they are bent a little, and the first 
thing to be done is to straighten 



Fig. 1.—Straightening the Wires. 

them. A great many of them are 
placed together in two strong iron 
rings, heated red hot and cooled 
slowly so as to soften them, and then 
rolled over and over with an instru¬ 
ment called a smooth-file, as shown 
in the picture (Fig. 1). It will be seen 
that the smooth-file has two slits in 
it, through which the rings pass, so 
that it comes right on to the wires 



time is put under the press, the 
boy pulls a handle, and the two 
steel punches are pressed down 
through the dents made by the 
' ,! stamping machine. In Fig. 3, a 
shows the blank after it has 
been sharpened ; b, after it has 
been grooved and dented ; and 
c, after the eye has been punched. 

The blanks are now strung by 
running two fine wires through 
the eyes, as shown in Fig. 4, 
and are then bent backward and 
forward until they break in two 
in the middle, each blank thus mak¬ 
ing two needles. Each row of nee- 



Fig. 2.—Punching the Eyes. 


Fig. 4.—Stringing the Blanks. 

dies, still strung on the wire through 
the eyes, is put into a kind of hand 
vice, as shown in Fig. 5, and held 
firmly while the heads are filed into 


and rolls them out straight. The 
blanks are then ground sharp at 
both ends on small grindstones. 

The middle of each one is next 
flattened and grooves made on each 
side in a stamping machine, which 
also makes little dents where the 
eyes are to be. The eyes are 
punched through in a small hand 



Fig. 5.—Row of Needles in Vice. 

shape. They are next straightened 
again, then heated red - hot and 
cooled quickly in cold oil, and 
then tempered by heating 
them again slowly and letting 
them cool slowly. 

They now have the form 
of needles, but are black and 
not very smooth, and have 
to be brightened and pol¬ 
ished. A great many of them are 
rolled up together in pieces of can- 


a - — 

T> - ■ 

C — - 

Fig. 3.—Needle Blanks. 

press, shown in Fig. 2, which is 
worked by a boy. One blank at a 




























NEEDLE 


418 


NERVES 


vas with some soft-soap, emery, and 
oil, and wound round with twine 
so as to make a roll, as shown 
in Fig. 6. Several of these rolls, 
which are usually about a yard long, 



Fig. 6.—Roll ready for Scouring. 

are laid on a kind of table with sides 
to it, as shown in Fig. 7, and rolled 
over and over under flat blocks of 
stone, which are moved backward and 
forward by machinery. This rolling 


Fig. 7.—Scouring Needles. 

goes on usually for two or three 
days, and sometimes as long as a 
week in making very fine needles ; 
and, as the canvas soon wears out, 
the rolls have to be made up new 
about once in eight hours. In some 
factories needles are scoured by roll¬ 
ing them around in barrels. After 
scouring they are washed, and a little 
girl, called the “ header,” then sorts 
them by putting the heads all one 
way. She does this very easily and 
quickly by pressing her finger, which 
is covered with a piece of wash 
leather, against one end of a pile of 
needles, when all with their points 
that way stick to the leather and are 
pulled out and laid right. The eyes 
are then blued by laying a row of 


needles on a steel slab so that the 
eyes just stick out over the edge, 
and holding a red-hot iron plate near 
them. The insides of the eyes are 
next drilled smooth by holding each 
needle against a little steel drill 
which turns round very fast, and the 
needles are then finished by polish¬ 
ing them on leather-covered wheels 
with a little polishing PASTE. They 
are lastly folded in colored papers, 
twenty-five in each paper, and 
labelled, when they are ready to be 
made up into large packets for 
market. 

This is the way of making the 
finest kind of English needles, but 
not so much care is taken with the 
coarser kinds. Needles are made in 
France out of iron wire, 
which is afterward made 
into steel, but they are not 
so good as English needles. 
Several machines for mak¬ 
ing needles have been built 
in this country, and many 
needles are now made by 
them. In one of them 
blanks long enough for two 
needles are put into a hop¬ 
per, or kind of box, from 
which one at a time is car¬ 
ried into the machine and 
finally falls out at the end 
a full-made needle, ready 
for scouring. 

The word needle is from the 
Anglo-Saxon ncedl, needle. 

NERVES. In the article Man it 
is told that the skull is so fitted upon 
the backbone that its hollow part 
comes right above the canal which 
runs down through the backbone. 
In fact its hollow is only a continua¬ 
tion of the hollow through the back¬ 
bone, swelled out into a rounded 
space. This space is filled with the 
brain, made up of a delicate whitish 
matter, which tapers off at the bot¬ 
tom into a thick white cord and 
runs down through the backbone. 
The cord part is called the spinal 
cord, spine being another name for 
the backbone, on account of the 

























NERVES 


419 


NERVES 


spines or thorn-like points which 
stick out from it. Though the brain 
and the spinal cord have different 
names, they are so joined together 
that it is hard to tell where the one 
ends and the other begins. 

The matter of which the brain and 
the spinal cord are made up is 
called nervous matter, and from it 
branch little cords, called nerves, 
which run to all parts of the body. 
The nerves which come from the 
brain pass through holes in the bot¬ 
tom part of the skull, and spread 
out irregularly, but those which 
come from the spinal cord are 
much more regular, branching out 
from between each of the joints of 
the backbone, where there are little 
hollows for them. These spinal 
nerves, as they are called, soon di¬ 
vide into branches which spread out 
into the different parts of the body, 
and again divide into smaller 
branches, which keep on dividing 
until they form the finest of white 
threads, too small to be seen. The 
nerves which come from the brain 
are joined chiefly to the organs of 
the senses, such as the eye, the 
nose, the mouth, and the ear ; those 
which come from the spinal cord 
are joined mainly to the muscles and 
to the skin of the neck, body, and 
limbs. 

The brain is the seat of the mind, 
which governs all the movements of 
the body; and it is through the 
nerves that the mind knows of what 
is going on outside of the body and 
sends its orders to the muscles which 
move the different parts. When we 
see, smell, taste, or hear anything, 
the nerves carry the news to the 
brain, and in this way we know that 
we see, smell, taste, and hear. If 
the nerves joining the eye with the 
brain should be cut, we would not be 
able to see anything ; and if those 
which join the ear with the brain 
were cut, we could not hear any¬ 
thing. The eye would form its im¬ 
age just the same, and the drum of 
the ear would still be moved by ' 


sound-waves, but we should never 
know of them if we had no nerves 
to telegraph the news to the brain. 
The sense of touch is common to 
all parts of the body, but wherever 
we feel anything, whether it be in 
the face or in parts more distant from 
the brain, such as the fingers and 
the toes, the brain at once knows of 
it through the nerves, whose little 
threads reach out everywhere. 

Thus all our sensations, of sight, 
of smell, of taste, of hearing, and 
of touch, are carried to the brain by 
the nerves. But the nerves have 
also another duty, that of carrying 
the will of the brain to the different 
muscles, by means of which all the 
movements of the body are made. 
In the article Muscles it is told that 
most of the muscles can be moved 
by us at our will. In the muscle 
called the biceps, which lies on the 
front of the upper arm and by means 
of which the forearm is bent up, are 
several little thread - like nerves. 
After leaving the biceps they are 
soon met with others which join 
them and form thicker nerve cords. 
These join others and thus become 
thicker again, until at last they join 
one of the nerves which come out 
from between the joints of the back¬ 
bone somewhere in the neck, and 
thus become united with the spinal 
cord, and through it with the brain. 
Thus the biceps muscle is joined to 
the brain. Now, when you will to 
bend your arm, the brain telegraphs 
through the nerves to this muscle, 
which at once swells up and short¬ 
ens, and thus draws up your forearm. 
If by any chance the little threads 
which go into the muscle should be¬ 
come broken, you would find that 
you were unable to bend your arm. 
You might will it ever so much, but 
the muscle would stay quiet and 
your arm would not move. It is the 
same with the other muscles of the 
body. Each one is joined to the 
brain by nerves, and thus all the 
movements of the body are caused 
by the brain. 




NETS 


420 


NICKEL 


There are then two kinds of 
nerves : those which carry feelings 
or sensations from the skin and other 
organs of sense to the brain, and 
therefore called sensory nerves ; and 
those which carry the will of the 
brain to the muscles, and so cause 
them to move, and therefore called 
motor nerves. Motor nerves have 
only one kind of work to do, but as 
there are several senses, so there are 
several kinds of sensory nerves. 
We can easily tell whether anything 
is rough or smooth, hot or cold, wet 
or dry, by feeling it with the finger, 
but we cannot tell the difference be¬ 
tween sweet and sour things in that 
way. The tongue, however, at once 
finds out the difference, because it 
is joined to the brain by sensory 
nerves of another kind. So also the 
sensory nerves of sight, smell, and 
hearing differ from those of taste 
and of touch, but exactly in what 
way is hard to tell. 

The word nerve is from the Latin 
nervus , Greek neuron, a nerve or 
sinew. 

NETS. Fishing nets are made 
commonly of hemp or flax twine, 
but some are made of cotton and 
some of jute and other materials. 
The threads are not woven across 
each other close together as in 
cloth, but wide apart, so as to make 
square holes called meshes, each 
thread being fastened where it 
crosses another one by a kind of 
knot. The size of the meshes and 
of the twine differs in different kinds 
of nets. For a long time nets were 
knit by hand, and a good many are 
still made in this way by fishermen 
and their families, but they are now 
knit mostly by machinery. 

Fishermen have many kinds, but 
those most in use are the seine, drift, 
and trawl nets. The seine is a very 
long but not very wide net, one side 
of which is loaded with pieces of 
lead, and the other or upper side 
with floats made of cork. When let 
down into the water the upper side 
floats and the lower side hangs down 


straight; so that when stretched 
out it forms a kind of long wall, in 
which great schools or shoals of fish 
may be enclosed. Some seines are 
nearly a fifth of a mile long. The 
drift net is made like the seine, but 
has no leads on the bottom. The 
trawl net is a kind of drag net for 
catching fish which swim near the 
bottom. It is usually dragged along 
by the fishing boat. The hand or 
scoop net is a small net hung on a 
hoop at the end of a pole, and is used 
to catch small fish, crabs, etc., by 
scooping them up from the water. 
Different kinds of nets are used also 
for catching birds and small qua¬ 
drupeds, and sometimes broad nets 
are spread over fruit trees to keep the 
birds away from them. 

The word net is Anglo-Saxon. 

NETTLE, the name of plants cov¬ 
ered with fine stinging hairs, which 
cause a painful smarting in the skin. 
The hairs are very sharp and so 
brittle that they break off, and the 
poisonous juice of the plant then 
flows into the wound. Animals will 
not eat growing nettles, but they like 
them when dried in hay, and in 
Sweden they are raised to feed to 
cattle. The fibre of the nettle is 
very strong, and in the northern 
countries of Europe it is used for 
thread, and fish lines and twine are 
made of it. It has also been woven 
into cloth. Young nettle shoots are 
sometimes boiled for greens, and in 
some parts of England the stalks and 
leaves are made into a kind of beer. 

The word nettle is from the Anglo- 
Saxon netele , the nettle plant. 

NICKEL, a metal and one of the 
elements. When pure it is silvery 
white, and does not oxidize or tar¬ 
nish in the air. It can easily be 
hammered out into thin sheets or 
drawn into wire, is stronger than 
iron, and is almost as hard to melt 
as iron. Nickel is found in many 
parts of the world, but chiefly in 
Russia, Sweden, Germany, Austria, 
England, and Scotland ; and, in the 
United States, in Pennsylvania and 




NITRIC ACID 


421 


NITROGEN 


Connecticut. It is hard to separate 
it from its ores, as it is usually- 
mixed with a good many other things. 

The chief use of nickel is for plat¬ 
ing other metals, to which it gives 
a beautiful silver-like surface that 
keeps them from rusting. Among 
the things now plated with it are 
knives, forks, tea-sets, buckles, bits, 
skates, surgical instruments, the 
scales of thermometers, the arms of 
railway seats, chandeliers, and gas 
fixtures. The copper rollers used in 
calico printing are now also plated 
with nickel, such rollers lasting three 
or four times as long as plain copper 
ones, which are much softer. 

Several valuable ALLOYS are made 
with nickel, among which is German 
silver, made up of one part of nickel, 
one part of zinc, and two parts of 
copper. The best German silver is 
nearly as white as pure silver, and 
takes a fine polish. The copper 
coins of several European countries 
are alloys of nickel. In the United 
States we have five-cent pieces and 
three-cent pieces, made of three 
parts of copper and one part of 
nickel. 

Nickel was first found out about a 
hundred years ago (1751) in a kind 
of ore called by the old miners 
kupfernickel , Nick’s copper or false 
copper, because, though it looked 
much like copper ore, they could 
never get any copper out of it. The 
word is made up of kupfer, copper, 
and nickel , a short form of Nicholas, 
a name sometimes given to the 
devil, and our word nickel comes 
from this. 

NITRE. See Saltpetre. 

NITRIC ACID, athick, oily liquid, 
made up of hydrogen, nitrogen, 
and oxygen. It is about half as 
heavy again as water, and when pure 
is colorless, but is generally yellow¬ 
ish. It is a very biting liquid, and 
will quickly char or burn and turn 
yellow most animal and vegetable 
substances. On this account it was 
called in old times aqua fortis 
(Latin, strong water), and it is still 


commonly known by that name. 
Nitric acid will easily mix with 
water, and that generally sold has in 
it one half or two thirds water. It is 
commonly made out of nitre or 
saltpetre, or from Chili saltpetre, 
sometimes called soda-nitre, a kind 
of salt gathered on a desert in Chili 
and Peru. Common saltpetre has 
POTASSIUM in it, while Chili salt¬ 
petre has sodium instead of it. 
Either one of these substances is 
heated with sulphuric acid in 
earthenware vessels, or in iron ves¬ 
sels coated on the inside with clay ; 
the sulphuric acid unites with the 
potash or the soda, and leaves the 
nitric acid separated. 

Nitric acid is much used in the 
arts, to act on metals, earths, 
liquids, and other things. Etching 
(see Engraving) on copper is done 
with it, tin for making mordants for 
DYES is dissolved in it, and it is of 
great importance in getting metals 
from ores. When mixed with 
muriatic ACID it forms aqua regia , 
the only thing which will dissolve 
gold. It is sometimes given in weak 
doses as a medicine, and is also used 
as a CAUSTIC. Nitric acid joins 
with BASES to form nitrates, which 
are of greater value than the acid i U 
self. These are made up of nitro¬ 
gen, oxygen, and some metal ; for 
instance, silver nitrate is nitrogen, 
oxygen, and silver, and potassium 
nitrate (saltpetre) is nitrogen, 
oxygen, and potassium. 

Nitric acid gets its name from 
nitre, Latin nitrum, Greek nitron, 
saltpetre, and ACID. 

NITROGEN, one of the principal 
elements. Nitrogen forms four- 
fifths of the air, and makes up a 
part of all animals and vegetables. 
In its usual form, it is a gas without 
color, taste, or smell, and not quite 
so heavy as air; but it may be 
changed into a liquid by a great 
amount of cold and of pressure. 
Nitrogen is not at all like OXYGEN, 
which is mixed with it in the air. 
Instead of being lively and showing 




NITROGEN 


422 


NUTMEG 


a desire to unite with other sub¬ 
stances, it is very mild and unites 
with only a few other things. Flame 
will go out and animals will die in it. 
But it does not really put out flame, 
nor kill animals ; flame goes out and 
animals die in it because there is no 
oxygen. They are suffocated, just 
as a drowning man is, by being cut 
off from the air. Although nitrogen 
will not keep up life, it is of great 
importance in the world. If it were 
not mixed with the oxygen in the 
air, we could not live long, and 
everything that can burn would be 
likely to burn up. The chief use of 
nitrogen then is to mix with the 
oxygen in the air so as to make it fit 
to be breathed by us. 

Though nitrogen is a very mild 
substance when in the air, and 
though it shows a general dislike to 
other substances, it will unite with 
a few other things ; and when it 
does unite thus it forms some of the 
most powerful of compounds, such 
as nitric ACID, or aqua fortis , 
ammonia, or hartshorn, nitro-GLY- 
CERINE, and prussic ACID. 

The word nitrogen, which means 
nitre-maker, is made from the Greek 
nitron, nitre, and gennein, to make ; 


and nitrogen is so called because it 
is always a part of nitre or salt¬ 
petre. 

NUTMEG, the fruit of the nutmeg 
tree, which grows in the East In¬ 
dies, the West India islands, and in 
South America. The fruit, when 
ripe, is golden yellow, and looks 
like a round pear. It has a hard 
fleshy part, something like candied 
fruit, which is preserved and eaten 
as a sweetmeat. Within this is the 
nut, in a thin, shining brown shell, 
inclosed in a bright-red network, 
which is the mace of commerce. 
Mace, when dried in the sun and 
pressed, becomes yellow. The inner 
nut is the nutmeg, which is used 
mostly as a spice. The oil of mace 
is made by pressing nutmegs, and 
not mace, as is generally supposed. 

The word nutmeg is made from 
the Latin words nux, nut, and 
muscus, musk, and therefore means 
musk nut. In England, in old times, 
it was quite fashionable to use nut¬ 
megs as a perfume, and it was no 
uncommon sight to see one set in sil¬ 
ver and ornamented with pearls and 
precious stones, hanging from a 
lady’s belt, like a modern scent-bot¬ 
tle. 




0 


OAK, the name of an important 
kind of tree belonging to the same 
family with the CHESTNUT and the 
beech. Oaks grow in almost all 
cool countries, and some are found 
in warm countries. They are among 
the largest and finest of forest trees, 
and have strong and hardy trunks 
and wide-spreading branches. Some 
oaks shed their leaves every year 
and some are evergreens, and the 
leaves of the different kinds vary 
much in shape and color ; but all 
are alike in their fruits, which are 
called ACORNS. The most valuable 
timbers are furnished by the oaks, 
and their barks are put to many 
uses, especially tanning, dyeing, 
and making CORKS. 

The White Oak, which grows 
almost all over the United States, is 
one of the most important of the 
oaks. It is a beautiful shade tree, 
and very valuable on account of the 
hardness and toughness of its wood, 
which is much used for ship build¬ 
ing, wagon making, and farmers’ 
tools. It makes good charcoal, but 
is not so good for fuel as hickory. 
Its bark is excellent for tanning 
leather. 

The Burr Oak and the Rough 
White Oak are found from New 
England through the Southern and 
Western States, and are almost as 
valuable as the white oak for ship 
building, etc. 

The Live Oak, which is the best 
of all trees for ship building and for 
any kind of wood-work under water, 
grows along the coast from Virginia 
to Texas. It is an evergreen, and 


has thick shiny leaves, which, unlike 
those of most other kinds of oaks, 
are smooth, or without teeth, on the 
edges. The tree is very large, with 
wide-spreading branches ; its wood 
is yellow and close-grained. 

The Holm or Holly, the evergreen 
oak of Europe, grows usually near 
the sea coast. It also is much 
prized for ship building. 

The Common European Oak, 
sometimes called British oak and 
royal oak, which grows almost all 
over Europe and in western Asia, is 
the kind most used for cabinet work. 
It does well when planted in the 
United States. Most of the oak 
furniture in use is made of the wood 
of this oak. 

Oaks which yield dyes are the 
black or yellow-barked oak, from 
the bark of which the yellow dye 
called quercitro 7 i is made, and the 
kermes oak, a kind of shrub growing 
on the eastern shores of the Medi¬ 
terranean, from which a scarlet dye 
is obtained. This scarlet dye does 
not come from the oak itself, but 
from the dried bodies of an insect, 
something like the COCHINEAL in¬ 
sect, which feeds on its leaves. They 
are round and about as large as a 
pea, and are called kermes. 

The word oak is from the Anglo- 
Saxon oc , oak. 

OATS, the grain of a kind of grass 
of the same name, which grows 
mostly in cool climates. Oats differ 
in looks from wheat, rye, or bar¬ 
ley, especially in the grains, which 
grow on many little branches, as 
shown in the picture, instead of in an 

423 



OATS 


424 


OILS 


ear. They will grow in colder and 
wetter climates and on poorer soils 
than other grains, excepting coarse 
kinds of barley, and are therefore 
much raised in northern countries. 
The grains contain much starch, 
some sugar, gum, and oil, and a 
good deal of nitrogenous matter 
(see Food). They form a great 
part of the food of the common peo¬ 
ple in Scotland, where they are 
ground into meal and made into 
cakes and porridge. The Scotch 
porridge is made in the same way 
as hasty pudding, and is usually 
eaten cold with milk. Much of it is 



// 

Oats. 


now eaten in this country, and it is 
a very strong and healthful food. 
Oaten groats or grits are the whole 
grains freed from the husks. Those 
made at Emden, in Prussia, and 
therefore called Emden groats, are 
crushed into small pieces. 

Oats are sometimes mixed with 
barley in distillation (see Alcohol), 
and in Russia a liquor called quass 
is made from them. But the chief 
use of oats is for feeding horses, 
which like this grain better than 
any other. The husks also are 
mixed with other food and fed to 
horses, cattle, and sheep, and the 


straw is the best of all straws for 
fodder. 

The word oat is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ata, oat. 

OILS. There are two kinds of 
oils, one called fixed oils, and the 
other essential or volatile oils. The 
fixed oils, which include also fats, 
are sometimes a thin liquid, like 
olive oil, and sometimes a solid, like 
lard or beef tallow. They will all 
melt at a lower heat than is needed 
to boil water, but they cannot be 
distilled (see Alcohol), that is, 
heat will not turn them into a vapor 
which when cold will turn back into 
oil again. For this reason they are 
called fixed oils. But the essential 
oils (so called because they contain 
the essential part or essence of the 
plants from which they are made, 
from Latin essentia , essence, esse , 
to be) will all pass off in vapor at 
common temperatures or heats. 
For this reason they are called also 
volatile oils (from Latin volare, to 
fly away). 

Fixed Oils are obtained from both 
animals and vegetables. The most 
important solid animal fats are lard, 
butter, and tallow ; the chief solid 
vegetable fats are palm oil, cocoanut 
oil, and butter of cacao. The most 
useful fluid oils obtained from ani¬ 
mals are sperm and other whale oil, 
and cod, seal, shark, porpoise, and 
dolphin oils. The fluid vegetable 
oils may be divided into two classes : 
drying oils, or those which take up 
oxygen from the air and become dry 
and hard when thinly smeared over 
anything ; and non-drying oils, or 
those which do not thus become dry. 
The principal drying oils are linseed, 
walnut, poppy, and hemp. They 
are largely used to mix with paints, 
which would not dry if they were 
mixed with non-drying oils. The 
non-drying oils are greasy and turn 
rancid, that is, spoil, instead of dry¬ 
ing, when used in the same way as 
drying oils. The principal ones are 
olive, almond, colza (made from the 
seeds of a kind of cabbage which 






OILS 


425 


OIL CLOTH 


grows in France and Belgium), 
peanut, cotton seed, and mustard 
seed oils. Castor oil will dry, but 
not until after a long time. 

Oils are made up of carbon, oxy¬ 
gen, and HYDROGEN, mixed in dif¬ 
ferent proportions. When pure they 
are without smell or taste, but they 
usually contain a little of certain 
ACIDS which give them an odor. 
They are generally light yellow, but 
may be bleached white by leaving 
them in the light. None of them 
will mix with water, but they will 
dissolve in ether and turpentine, and 
generally in alcohol. The fixed 
oils may be separated into three 
things, two of which, stearine (from 
Greek stear , tallow) and palmitine , 
are solid at common heat, and the 
third, oleine (from Latin oleum , oil), 
is liquid. Beef tallow is mostly 
stearine ; butter and olive oil, oleine 
and palmitine. The uses of the 
oils and fats are numerous and im¬ 
portant : soaps, candles, paints, oint¬ 
ments, and other things are made 
from them, and they are used for 
food and medicine, for greasing ma¬ 
chinery, for burning in lamps and 
stoves, for making gas, for dressing 
leather, and many other purposes. 

Essential Oils are like the fixed 
oils in some things : they will burn, 
are lighter than water, will not 
mix with water, and will mix with 
ether and with alcohol ; but they 
are unlike them in passing off in¬ 
to the air in the form of vapor at 
common heats, and in not leaving a 
greasy stain on paper after drying. 
They are got from plants by distill¬ 
ing with water the flowers, wood, or 
other part of the plant which con¬ 
tains the oil. The vapor of the oil 
mixed with the vapor or steam of 
the water passes over into the con¬ 
denser, where all the vapors are 
cooled, and the oil settles and floats 
on the top of the water. Essential 
oils must be kept in close vessels or 
they will pass off as vapor. They 
are largely used in the arts, especially 
in the making of perfumes, the 


flavoring of confectionery and of 
liqueurs, and in medicine. The oil 
of turpentine, an essential oil dis¬ 
tilled from common turpentine, 
is very valuable because it will dis¬ 
solve the RESINS and India-rubber. 
It is largely used in making var¬ 
nishes. Other principal essential 
oils are made from various gums, 
resins, and spices, and from the 
seeds, fruits, flowers, leaves, bark, 
and other parts of plants. 

The word oil is from the Latin 
oleum , oil. 

OIL CLOTH, or FLOOR CLOTH, 

a covering for floors made of painted 
canvas. In this country it is usually 
called oil cloth, but in England floor 
cloth. The canvas, which is gen¬ 
erally made of stout hemp, must be 
without a seam, else it will not 
wear well, so it has to be woven 
very wide. Some canvas made for 
this purpose is woven as wide as 
the height of four men (twenty-four 
feet), and ten or fifteen times as long 
as that. The piece to be painted is 
first stretched very tight over a frame 
which stands up and down between 
the floor and ceiling of the painting 
room. It is then covered with a 
coating of weak glue called size, and 
rubbed down with PUMICE stone 
while still damp. The size fills up 
the spaces between the threads, so 
that the paint will not sink in too 
deep, which would make the oil 
cloth break too easily when dry. 
The pumice stone smooths down all 
the rough places on the cloth. A 
coating of thick paint, much thicker 
than that used by house painters, is 
next spread over the surface and 
well rubbed in with a steel trowel, 
something like a plasterer’s trowel. 
Two more coatings of this kind are 
put on, each one being left to dry 
before the next one is spread and 
smoothed down with pumice stone. 
A fourth coat of thin paint is then 
put on with a brush. All of these 
coatings are of one color, like that 
seen on the underside of oil cloths, 
and they are put on both sides alike. 








OLIVE 


426 


ONION 


When thoroughly dry the cloth is 
ready to have the pattern printed on 
its face or upper side. This is done 
usually in another room on a long 
flat table. The printing is done by 
means of wooden blocks in much 
the same way in which calicoes 
are printed by hand. Each block 
has a part of the pattern cut on its 
underside, and there is a separate 
block for every color. For example, 
if the oil cloth is to have black, 
white, and green in it, the block 
which prints the black part of the 
pattern will be stamped on first, it 
being moved along from place to 
place until the whole surface has 
been covered. After this is dry the 
white will be put on in the same 
way, and when that is dry the green 
will be stamped on. If there is to 
be a border on the cloth a space is 
left bare for it, and it is afterward put 
on with small blocks. 

OLIVE, the fruit of an evergreen 
tree which belongs to the same fam¬ 
ily with the lilac, the ash, and 
others. The tree, which grows 
about four times as high as a man, 
is supposed to have first come from 
western Asia, but is now largely 
raised all around the Mediterranean. 
Some are grown also in South Amer¬ 
ica, Mexico, and California. Its 
leaves are much like those of the 
willow, and are dull green above 
and whitish beneath ; and its flow¬ 
ers, which are small and white, 
grow in clusters. The wood is 
greenish yellow with dark spots and 
veins, and fine grained, and is much 
used by cabinet makers and turners 
for fine work ; and the wood of the 
roots is made into small boxes and 
ornaments. There are several kinds 
of olive trees, the fruit of which 
varies in size from that of a cherry 
to a pigeon’s egg. Olives are 
either pickled or made into oil, being 
too bitter to eat as fruit. Those to 
be pickled are picked when green 
and soaked in strong lye (see Ashes) 
or lime water, which makes them 
softer and milder in taste ; they are 


then soaked in water for several 
days, the water being changed often, 
and are finally put into jars or bot¬ 
tles, covered with strong brine 
seasoned with cloves, cinnamon, and 
other spices, and sealed up. A com¬ 
mon kind are often packed in small 
wooden kegs. 

Olive Oil is made from the ripe 
fruit, which is ground to a pulp, put 
into coarse bags and pressed ; the 
oil runs into a cistern of water, on 
the top of which it floats, and from 
which it is dipped out. After the 
first pressing the pulp is wet with 
boiling water and pressed again, but 
the oil thus made is of poorer qual¬ 
ity than the first. Olives which have 
just begun to ripen make the best 
oil, which is of a slight greenish 
color, but those fully ripe make the 
most oil. In Europe olive oil is 
largely used in cooking and is eaten 
instead of butter, but in this coun¬ 
try is chiefly used for dressing sal¬ 
ads. Much is made, in the coun¬ 
tries where olives are raised, into 
Castile and other soaps. A kind of 
resin, which is found on the trunks 
of old olive trees, smells like vanilla, 
and is used in Italy for perfumery. 

The word olive is from the Latin 
oliva , the olive tree. 

ONION, the common name of a 
kind of plant which includes also 
the garlic, leek, shallot, and 
chives. The onion first came from 
western Asia, but is now cultivated 
almost all over the world. It is 
raised usually from the seed ; the 
plant produces a bulb the first year, 
and if this bulb be planted the second 
year, a flower stalk will sprout from 
it which will bear seed. Potato or 
ground onions do not bear seed, but 
form many small bulbs under¬ 
ground ; and top or tree onions 
bear, instead of seed, a cluster of 
little onions on the top of a stalk. 
Onions are much used, both raw 
and cooked, for food, and also as a 
seasoning for soups and other dishes. 
They are easily digested and are 
very healthful. In Spain and Portu- 









OPAL 


427 


OPOSSUM 


gal a raw onion is often eaten like 
an apple, or sliced and eaten on 
bread. Onions are used in medicine 
like garlic. They are brought to 
our markets chiefly from the Bermu¬ 
das and the New England States. 

The Leek has no bulb, but the 
stem thickens at the bottom some¬ 
thing like one. Its flavor is milder 
than that of the onion. It is much 
used in cooking, especially by the 
Welsh. 

The word leek is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ledc , leek. 

The Shallot is a small onion, with 
a flavor something like that of gar¬ 
lic, but milder. Its bulbs are used 
like onions, and its leaves like chives. 

The word shallot is rightly escha¬ 
lot, Spanish escalona, which is from 
Ascalon, a town in Palestine, from 
which it was first brought to Europe 
by the Crusaders. 

Chives, or cives, are a kind of 
small onions, with flat bulbs grow¬ 
ing in clusters. The leaves are used 
for flavoring soups and other dishes. 

The word chives is from the 
French cive , which is from the Latin 
cepa , an onion. 

The word onion is from the Latin 
unto , a large kind of onion, named 
from units, one, because its bulb 
was made up of a single piece. 

ONYX. See Agate. 

OPAL, a mineral much like quartz, 
but more beautiful. Precious or 
noble opal is bluish or yellowish 
white, and has a fine play of bright 
colors in it, like the colors of the 
rainbow. It is much valued for set¬ 
ting in rings, brooches, and other 
ornaments. The finest opal comes 
from Hungary, but some is brought 
from Mexico. Opals for jewels are 
always cut with a round surface, 
which shows their colors best. 
Common opal is of various colors, 
white, yellow, red, brown, or green, 
and has no play of colors. It is cut 
into slabs and made into boxes and 
ornamental articles. 

The word opal is from the Latin 
opalus, Greek opallios , the opal. 


OPIUM, a drug, the dried juice of 
the white poppy. The poppy grows 
wild in India, Persia, and other 
parts of Asia. In Europe and 
America it is cultivated as a garden 
flower, but in India, Persia, Asia 
Minor, Arabia, and Egypt, it is 
largely grown for its opium. A few 
days after the flowers have fallen 
men go through the poppy fields in 
the afternoon and make little cuts in 
the poppy heads ; a milky juice oozes 
out and dries into a soft brown sticky 
paste ; each morning this paste is 
scraped off and put into jars, and is 
afterward made into balls of about 
a half pound each and packed into 
chests to be sent to foreign coun¬ 
tries. The most opium is raised in 
India and sent thence to China, 
where it is largely used for smoking 
with tobacco. The opium brought 
to the United States comes chiefly 
from Smyrna. With us it is used 
mostly as a medicine in the form of 
laudanum and paregoric. Lauda¬ 
num is simply opium dissolved in 
alcohol ; paregoric is made up of 
opium, camphor, honey, alcohol, 
and other things. The value of 
opium lies in its power of quieting 
the nerves and taking away pain ; 
but if too much is taken it puts one 
into so deep a sleep that one never 
awakes from it. 

The word opium is from the Latin 
opium, Greek opion, poppy-juice. 

OPOSSUM. There are several 
kinds of opossums, none of which 
live anywhere but in America. The 
common Virginia opossum, which is 
found all over the United States, is 
about as large as a cat, but is shaped 
more like a rat. It has short legs, 
a long smooth tail covered with 
scales instead of hair, and a sharp 
rat-like nose. Its fur is a thick coat 
of light gray wool, with long hairs 
sticking out of it, and its ears, nose, 
feet, and tail are almost black. Un¬ 
derneath the female is a kind of 
pouch or bag, in which she carries 
her young for about five weeks after 
they are born. At the end of that 




OPOSSUM 


428 


OPOSSUM 


time the little ones leave the pouch, 
hut they often go back into it to 
suck or when they are frightened, 
until they are about two months old, 
when they are large enough to take 
care of themselves. 

The opossum spends the day 
mostly in hiding among the leaves, 
in hollow trees or logs, and in holes 
in the ground, or swinging from 
limb to limb by means of its tail. 

It may often be seen hanging by 
the tail or by one or more of its feet, 
eating wild grapes or persimmons, 



or robbing birds’ nests. In the 
night it usually prowls around look¬ 
ing for food. It lives chiefly on nuts, 
berries, and tender twigs and roots, 
but eats also insects, worms, birds, 
mice, and other small animals. It 
never digs in the ground, but builds 
its nest in the hollows of logs, and 
in holes at the roots of trees. Into 
these it will carry leaves and make 
itself a bed, when bad weather is 
coming on. Opossums get very fat 
in the autumn, and are then much 
prized for food in the Southern 


Surinam Opossum. 


States, especially by the negroes, 
who take great delight in hunting 
them ; but dogs will not eat them. 
Their flesh when cooked is much 
like roast pig. When attacked the 
opossum looks very fierce, snarls, 
growls, and will often bite, but if 
struck will make believe dead and 
will not stir even if it is hurt ; but it 
will watch slyly and crawl away as 
soon as its enemy is gone. From 
this comes our phrase “to play 
’possum.’’ 

The other kinds of opossums are 


found chiefly in South America. 
Among the most cunning of all is 
one which lives in Surinam. The 
young ones hang fast to the nipples 
or teats of the mother until they are 
able to run around, and then they 
are carried on her back, where they 
cling fast to her wool and hold them¬ 
selves by coiling their tails round 
hers, as shown in the picture. 

The opossum is a mammal of the 
order marsupialia , or pouch-bearing 
animals, to which the KANGAROO 
also belongs. 








ORANGE 


429 


ORCHESTRA 


The word opossum is from opas- 
som, the Indian name of this animal. 

ORANGE, the fruit of a tree be¬ 
longing to the same family with the 
lemon, lime, citron, and shad¬ 
dock. Some think that there are 
four or five different kinds of 
oranges, and some that there is 
only one kind, which has become 
changed into several varieties by 
climate • and cultivation. The 
orange tree was first brought from 
India, where it grows wild, but it is 
now raised in almost all warm coun¬ 
tries. The bitter orange was car¬ 
ried into Europe first about the 
eleventh century through Arabia, 
but it is supposed that the sweet 
orange was not cultivated in Europe 
much before the fifteenth century. 

The orange tree grows about as 
large as a small apple tree. It 
blooms but once a year, bearing a 
great number of beautiful, fragrant, 
white flowers, in clusters, with 
which brides are crowned and dec¬ 
orated. The fruit ripens generally 
in about six months after blossom¬ 
ing. Oranges to be sent to foreign 
countries are picked when fully 
grown but while yet green, and are 
not so good as those which ripen on 
the trees. In some countries those 
intended to be eaten at home are al¬ 
lowed to hang all winter on the tree, 
and sometimes until the next sum¬ 
mer. 

The orange tree and its fruit have 
many uses. The wood is hard and 
close-grained, and is used by turners 
and joiners, and for making canes. 
The leaves, flowers, and rind of the 
fruit are full of fragrant oils, which 
are used in making COLOGNE and 
other perfumes. Orange flower 
water is used by druggists to flavor 
mixtures, and by cooks to flavor 
dishes. The fruit of the sweet 
orange is highly esteemed for eating, 
and that of the bitter orange for 
making marmalade. Orange peel 
is candied and used in flavoring pud¬ 
dings and other things. 

The oranges used in the United 


States are brought chiefly from 
Sicily, Malta, Spain, and the West 
Indies. Those from Europe are 
generally smooth and thin-skinned, 
and come rolled up in thin white 
paper. The West India fruit is 
rougher skinned and sweeter, and 
comes in bulk, that is, all packed to¬ 
gether without any wrappers. Malta 
oranges are called blood oranges, 
because they have a crimson pulp. 
The mandarin orange is a small flat 
orange formerly from China, but 
now raised in Algeria, Brazil, and 
other places. Many fine oranges 
are now raised in Florida and Cali¬ 
fornia. 

The word orange is from the Ara¬ 
bic 7 iarandj ', the orange tree. 

ORCHESTRA. In modern thea¬ 
tres the orchestra is the place in 
front of the stage where the musi¬ 
cians sit ; but the name is more com¬ 
monly given to a band of musicians 
who use mostly stringed instru¬ 
ments. A body of musicians using 
mostly wind instruments is common¬ 
ly called a band. 

A grand orchestra is made up of 
not less than sixty musicians, and 
often of more than a hundred. 
Three kinds of instruments are com¬ 
monly used : 1. Stringed instruments, 
made up of first violins, second 
violins, violas, violoncellos, and 
double basses ; 2. Wind instru¬ 
ments, made up of flutes, haut¬ 
boys, CLARINETS, BASSOONS, 
HORNS, TRUMPETS, and TROM¬ 
BONES ; 3. Beaten instruments, such 
as kettle drums, cymbals, and 
triangles. There are always 
many more stringed instruments than 
wind instruments, and usually very 
few beaten instruments. In modern 
music other instruments, such as 
the HARP, PIANOFORTE, ORGAN, 
bells, and bass and snare DRUMS, 
are sometimes added. In a military 
band only wind and beaten instru¬ 
ments are used. 

The word orchestra is Greek. It 
is made from orchesthai , to dance ; 
and the old Greeks gave it as a name 






ORGAN 


430 


ORGAN 


to the place in their theatres where 
some of the performers danced. 

ORGAN. When we look at a 
church organ from the outside we see 
only a row of pipes of different sizes 
above, and several key-boards, each 
one much like the key-board of a 
piano, below ; and we are led to 
wonder how so few pipes can make 
so much noise, and why so many 
key-boards, all just alike, are needed 
to play them. But if we go inside of 
an organ, we see why this is. 

An organ is really a great room, 
filled with hundreds and sometimes 
with thousands of pipes of many 
different kinds and shapes, but all 
so arranged that one can easily 
walk in and look at them. The 
pipes are usually put up in four dif¬ 
ferent groups or sets, each having a 



Organ Bellows. 

different key-board, so that a church 
organ is really four organs in one. 
The set of pipes in the front part, to 
which those seen from the outside 
belong, are called the great organ, 
which is played more than any other 
part of the organ. Behind it is 
another group of pipes which make 
up the choir organ, whose tones are 
not so strong, and which is chiefly 
used to sing with. Above the choir 
organ is a box full of pipes called the 
swell organ. This box is closed on 
three sides, but has blinds in front, 
which the organist can open and 
shut by pressing a board called a 
pedal with his foot. When the 
blinds are shut the sound of the or¬ 
gan is muffled and seems to be far 
away, but when open it comes out 


loud and full. Each of these or¬ 
gans is played by its own set of keys 
in a separate key-board placed one 
above the other like stairs. Each 
set of keys is called a manual (Latin 
inanus , the hand), because played 
by the hand. The lower one is the 
choir organ manual, the middle one 
the great organ manual, and the up¬ 
per one the swell organ manual. 

The fourth group of pipes inside 
the organ is called the pedal organ, 
because it is played by pedals (Latin 
pes, pedis , a foot), which are large 
keys moved by the feet. The ped¬ 
als are placed in a row under the 
manuals, where the organist can 
easily reach them with his feet while 
playing with his hands above. The 
pipes of the pedal organ are some¬ 
times set up in a group behind the 
choir organ, and some- 
,, times it is divided into 
two parts, one being set 
on each side. Any one 
of the four organs may 
be played separately, or 
two or three of them may 
be played together. 

The sounds of the or¬ 
gan are made in the 
pipes by wind, which is 
collected in a bellows 
and carried to the dif¬ 
ferent parts by machinery worked 
by the organist. We may divide the 
working part therefore into three 
parts : 1, the bellows ; 2, the ma¬ 
chinery which carries the air to the 
pipes ; 3, the pipes. 

1. Bellows. There are several 
kinds, but the one in the picture is 
the most common one in use. It is 
called the double bellows, because it 
is in two parts. It has in it three 
boards, one on top, A B, one in the 
middle, C D, and one at the bot¬ 
tom, E F. The part between A B 
and C D makes the upper part of the 
bellows, called the riser, because it 
goes up and down, and the part be¬ 
tween C D and E F the lower part, 
called the feeder, because it feeds 
the riser with air. The small parts 











t 


ORGAN 431 ORGAN 


marked W, P, and V are VALVES, or 
little doors opening through the 
three boards. All the parts between 
the boards are of leather, so made 
that they will fold flat together when 
the boards are brought near to each 
other, and which will open, as 
shown in the picture, when the 
boards are apart. The bellows are 
worked by the handle, H, of which 
only a part is seen. Now, suppose 
that the handle H is moved up until 
the board E F is flat against the 
board C D. There is then no air in 
the feeder ; but if the handle be next 
pressed down so as to be like the 
one in the picture, the pressure of 
the outside air will open the valve V 
and the air will rush in and fill it. 
If now the handle be pulled up to¬ 
wards D again, the air in the feeder 
will be pressed tight between the 
two boards. This will shut the 
valve V so that the air cannot get 
out that way, but will force open the 
valve P, and all the’airwill rush into 
the riser. Thus, each time the 
handle is pushed down, air rushes 
into the feeder through the valve V, 
and each time the handle is pulled 
up the same air rushes out of the 
feeder through the valve P into the 
riser. On top of the riser are kept 
some heavy weights which are all the 
time pressing it down. This forces 
the air out of it, through the box G, 
into a pipe called the wind-trunk, 
which leads to the wind-chest, which 
will be told about soon. The valve 
W on the top of the riser is called the 
waste valve, because when the bel¬ 
lows are full enough it lets out or 
wastes some of the air. In small 
organs one bellows usually gives air 
to the whole organ, but in some or¬ 
gans each part has its own bellows, 
and very large organs have some¬ 
times ten or twelve bellows. Some¬ 
times the bellows is worked by a 
man called the organ-blower, but in 
large organs, where there are many, 
they are moved by steam or water¬ 
power. In large organs, too, the 
bellows are often arranged differ¬ 


ently, but as they are hard to un¬ 
derstand, only a simple one is told 
about here. 

2. The Machinery which carries 
the air to the pipes is made up of the 
wind-trunks, the wind-chests, and 
the sound-boards. The wind-trunks 
are tubes to carry the air from the 
bellows to the wind-chests, from 
which the pipes are filled. Each one 
of the organs in a church organ has 
its own wind-chest ; that is, the 
great organ, the choir organ, the 
swell organ, and the pedal organ 
have each one, from which all the 
pipes of each get their wind. The 
wind-chest is a long box fitted to the 
under part of the sound-board. The 
sound-board is wrongly named, for 
only the pipes make any sound. It 
is really a long low box, about twice 
as wide as the wind-chest, divided 
up by thin boards, running from the 
front to the back into as many nar¬ 
row boxes as there are keys in the 
key-board. The wind-chest is fast¬ 
ened under the front part of the 
sound-board, and in its top is a row 
of valves, like long slat doors, each 
one opening into one of the narrow 
boxes of the sound-board. In the 
picture only one end of the wind- 
chest and one end of the narrow 
boxes of the sound-board are shown. 
In this A B is the wind-chest, C D is 
the sound-board, and v is one of the 
valves opening from the wind-chest 
into one of the boxes of the sound¬ 
board. 

The top of the sound-board, which 
is made of thick, strong board, is 
something like a chess-board, into 
each square of which is set the end 
of a pipe. The pipes of the organ 
are therefore in rows, which run 
both ways, from front to back, and 
from right to left, just like the 
squares of the chess-board. Each 
row of pipes running from front to 
back open into one of the narrow 
boxes of the sound-board ; and 
each row of pipes running from 
right to left has a slide fitted to the 
under side of the top of the sound- 




ORGAN 


432 


ORGAN 


board, with as many holes in it as 
there are pipes in the row, and so 
made that when it is pushed in the 
holes are shoved beyond the ends 
of the pipes in that row so that the 
wind cannot get into them, and when 
it is pulled out the holes are brought 
under the pipes so that the air can 
rush into all of them. All the slides 
run crosswise of the narrow boxes, 
so that when one is pushed in, the 
hole of one pipe opening into each 
box is closed. If there were no 
slides to open and close the pipes, 
every pipe in a row running from 
front to back would sound when 



r. — 

c 

- nk 

J ^51- 

- 2&L 

_1 


Side View of Organ. 

wind was let into the narrow box 
under them ; but by means of the 
slides the organist can sound any 
he wishes. On the front of the or¬ 
gan, near the key-board, are several 
rows of small knobs, made to draw 
out and push in. These, which are 
called stops, run back into the 
organ and move the slides told about 
above. Every organ has as many 
stops as it has rows of pipes run¬ 
ning from right to left. When all 
the stops are pushed in, all the rows 
of pipes are closed, and no pipe will 
sound, no matter how much wind is 


let into the boxes from the wind- 
chest. The first thing an organist 
does, therefore, when he sits down 
to play, is to pull out one or more of 
the stops. The different rows of 
pipes which the stops open and 
close have different tones and are 
named usually from something which 
they are thought to sound like : thus 
there are the OBOE stop, the TRUM¬ 
PET stop, the BASSOON stop, the 
FLUTE stop, th zvox humana (Latin, 
human voice) stop, and many others. 
When only one stop is drawn out 
the keys will play only on the pipes 
of the kind which mak$ up that 
stop ; but two or more 
may be drawn out and 
played at the same time, 
so as to make mixed 
tones. In some large 
organs there are fifty to 
one hundred stops. 

If you now look at the 
second picture again you 
will £ee how the machin¬ 
ery which lets the wind 
into the pipes works. 
In this only four pipes 
are shown opening into 
one of the narrow boxes 
of the sound-board, but 
some organs have many 
more. 

When the bellows of 
the organ is worked, the 
wind is forced through 
the wind-trunk into the 
wind-chest until it is 
filled full of air packed so closely 
that it is much denser or thicker 
than common air. At the bottom 
of the picture, on the left side, one 
of the keys of the organ is shown 
at f. The key is really a long 
stick running back to k , and so 
hung at c that it can move up and 
down. To the end of k is fastened 
a stick r, named a sticker, the other 
end of which is made fast to another 
piece l /, so fastened at e that it can 
move up and down. To the other 
end of / is fastened a wire w , which 
passes up through a hole in the 


































ORGAN 


433 


ORRIS ROOT 


bottom of the wind-chest and is 
made fast to the valve v. If you 
press down the key f with your 
finger, the other end, k, will push up 
the sticker ; the sticker will push up 
the right-hand end of /, which will 
bring down the left end, and this 
will pull the wire w and open the 
valve, letting the wind into one of 
the boxes of the sound-board, shown 
at CD. If all the slides which run 
under the four pipes in the picture 
are closed, none of the pipes will 
sound, and if all are open, all of 
them will sound.; as said before, 
the organjst can open as many as 
he pleases by pulling out stops. 
Thus, when the keys are pressed 
down the valves of the wind-chest 
open and let the wind into the differ¬ 
ent boxes of the sound-board, and 
those pipes sound whose slides have 
been opened by the stops. No pipe 
can sound until the drawing out of a 
stop opens the holes in the bottoms 
of the pipes, and the striking of a 
key lets the wind rush in under the 
pipes. Each stop has one pipe over 
each box of the sound-board, and 
each key opens and lets the air into 
one of the boxes. 

3. The Pipes of an organ are gen¬ 
erally of two kinds : flue pipes and 
reed pipes. Those usually seen in 
the front of an organ are flue pipes. 
Some flue pipes are made of 
metal and some of wood. 
Metal ones are usually round, 
and wooden ones square, 
like the right-hand one in 
the second picture. A metal 
flue pipe is made like the one 
in the third picture. In this b 
is the body and a is the foot ; 
c is a flat plate of metal, 
called the language, which 
reaches nearly across the 
pipe to the opening d e. 
When the wind is let in at 
the bottom of the foot, it 
rushes through the narrow slit at 
d , and in striking against e sets 
trembling the column of air in the 
body b t and thus makes a musical 


v 

Flue 

Pipe. 


Reed 

Pipe. 


note. Wooden flue pipes are a little 
different, but they work in much the 
same way. Some flue pipes are 
stopped up at the top, and others 
have a kind of chimney on 
them. Reed pipes are also 
made of both wood and metal. 

They have a kind of mouth¬ 
piece called a reed, something 
like that of a clarinet, fitted 
into a block inside the pipe. 

The wind, which is let in at 
the bottom in the same way 
as in the flue pipe, rushes up 
through the reed and causes 
a thin plate of metal called 
the tongue to tremble and 
make a musical note. One 
kind of reed is shown in the 
fourth picture. In this b is the block 
in the pipe, and r is the reed passing 
through it ; / is the thin metal 
tongue, and s is a wire by which the 
tongue may be made shorter or 
longer. 

Organ pipes are of many different 
sizes, some being no larger than a 
child’s whistle, while others are 
more than five times as long as a 
man, and large enough round for a 
boy to crawl through. The largest 
organ in the world is in Albert Hall, 
London. It has 138 stops, and 
nearly 10,000 pipes, all of metal. 
The largest one in America, in 
Music Hall, Boston, has 89 stops 
and 4000 pipes. 

The word organ is from the Latin 
organum , Greek organon, an instru¬ 


ment. 

ORRIS ROOT, the root of a kind 
of iris or flag plant, belonging to the 
same family with sweet flag. It 
grows wild in the south of Europe. 
The root, which smells like violets, 
is ground up and used to scent tooth 
powder, hair powder, violet powder, 
and hair oils. It is also distilled (see 
Alcohol) and made into a per¬ 
fume called essence of violets, 
though it has no violets in it. 

The word orris is merely a wrong 
form of iris, the Greek name of the 
plant. 













OSTRICH 


434 


OSTRICH 


OSTRICH. The ostrich is the 
largest of living birds, being often 
eight feet high, or two feet taller 
than a man. It is found chiefly in 
the barren sandy plains of Africa, 
but a few are sometimes seen in 
Arabia and other parts of Asia. The 
males are usually glossy black, with 
the exception of the loose feathers of 
the wings and tail, which are white. 
These white feathers are the ones 
used by ladies for hat plumes. The 
females and young birds are brown- 
•ish-gray. The head and neck are 
nearly bare, and the feathers of the 
body are not close like those of other 
birds, but so loose that the air can 
pass freely through them, while at 
the same time they shade the body 
from the sun. The eyesight and 
hearing of ostriches are very sharp, 
and as these birds are also very- 
swift, they are hard to catch. They 
cannot fly, but use their wings in 
running, and sometimes go at the 
rate of thirty miles an hour. 

Ostriches live chiefly on fruits, 
grain, leaves, tender shoots, snails, 
and insects. They swallow a good 
many stones to grind their food with, 
and have been known to gulp down 
pieces of iron, glass, leather, and 
other hard things. An ostrich kept 
in a menagerie once swallowed some 
copper coins and a piece of a parasol 
handle, but these were too much for 
its stomach and it died. They are 
generally called stupid birds, and 
the Arabs have a proverb, “ As 
stupid as an ostrich.” It is said 
that when one of them is hard 
pressed by the hunter it will thrust 
its head into a bush or into the 
sand, and imagine that it cannot be 
seen, because it cannot see. In 
South Africa the Bushmen cover 
their bodies with the skin of an os¬ 
trich, and by acting like one get 
near enough to the foolish birds to 
shoot them with poisoned arrows. It 
is said also that an ostrich will not 
step over anything more than a few 
inches high, notwithstanding their 
legs are so long, and that they may 


be shut in by a very low fence. But 
some travellers say that the ostrich 
is not so foolish as he is generally 
called, and that the stories told about 
his stupidity are slanders. 

Many ostriches are now kept on 
farms at the Cape of Good Hope for 
the sake of their feathers. The 
fields in which they are kept are 
sowed with grass, and this forms 
their chief food. When the female 
gets ready to lay she and the male 
scrape a large hole in the sand, and 
in this fifteen or twenty eggs are 
laid. An ostrich egg is very large 
and holds as much as twenty-four 
hen’s eggs. The Bushmen use the 
shells for water vessels. The male 
bird sits by night, the female in the 
morning and evening, the nest being 
often left uncovered during the heat 
of the day. The feathers of the 
young ostriches are first plucked 
when they are about eight months 
old ; but they are not then good for 
much. They are afterward plucked 
every eight months, and the feathers 
of each bird bring about $40 a year. 
Ostrich feathers are largely used for 
plumes, for trimming dresses, and 
for other ornamental purposes. 
White ones are scoured with soap 
and bleached. Black ones are white 
ones dyed with LOGWOOD and cop¬ 
peras. 

It is said that the ostrich will bear 
a man on his back, and that in some 
parts of Africa people ride on them 
more swiftly than we ride on horse¬ 
back. In the -zoological garden in 
the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, they 
have some fine ostriches which they 
harness to light carriages, in which 
children ride about the grounds. 
A man always goes along beside 
the bird, for fear that it may take it 
into its head to start off on a run at 
the rate of thirty miles an hour, as it 
does in its desert home. 

The American Ostrich, found in 
South America, differs some from 
the real ostrich, though its gen¬ 
eral shape is much like it. It is only 
about half as large, has no tail feath- 





OTTER 


435 


OWL 


ers, and has three toes, while the 
African ostrich has only two. It 
is sometimes called the nandu. 
These birds are very swift, but are 
caught on the plains of South Amer¬ 
ica by men who ride them down on 
horseback, and catch them with the 
lasso or the bolas (see Horse). 
Their feathers are not so valuable 
as those of the African ostrich, and 
are used chiefly for making feather 
brushes. In Patagonia the Indians 
make beautiful rugs out of the whole 
skin, after pulling out the long wing- 
feathers. 

The ostrich belongs to the order 
cursores, or running BIRDS. 

Our word ostrich is made from 
the Latin words avis, bird, and 
struthio , ostrich. The Spaniards 
still call it avestruz, which is much 
nearer the Latin than our name. 

OTTER. This animal is larger 
than others of the weasel family, to 
which it belongs, being often four 
feet long, and differs from them in 
living mostly in the water. Its paws 
are webbed for swimming, and its 
food is chiefly fish. Its fur is short, 
thick, fine, and quite handsome. In 
summer it is almost black, but in 
winter it turns to a beautiful reddish 
brown. Otters take as much de¬ 
light in sliding down hill as boys do, 
and may be seen going one after 
another down hills of mud and 
snow. They are found in almost all 
parts of the world, and the different 
kinds are very much alike. The 
American otter is plentiful in British 
America, where thousands are killed 
every year for their furs. 

The Sea Otter, found along the 
north Pacific coast of America, is 
much like the seal, with a head 
some like that of a cat. It feeds on 
fish, crabs, shell-fish, and sea plants. 
Sea otters live in couples. The 
female has but one young one at a 
time, and she takes the most ten¬ 
der care of it. A mother otter may 
often be seen playing with her little 
one on the ice and in the water. She 
frequently sleeps on top of the 


water, with her back downward and 
holding her baby in her fore paws. 
Hunters often kill them when thus 
asleep, for their fur, which is much 
prized in China and Russia. In 
China mandarins of high rank wear 
otter fur as a mark of office. 

The otter is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals. 

The word otter is from the Anglo- 
Saxon otyr , otter. 

OWL. The owl has a short, 
stout form, downy feathers, and a 
large head with a flat face. The eyes 
are round and staring, and have a 
fringe of stiff feathers around them ; 
the bill is short, strong, and hooked ; 
and the ears are very large and 
pointed forward. Some owls have 
tufts of feathers on the head which 
stand up like horns, from which they 
get the name of horned owls. 
During the daytime owls hide 
away in holes in trees, in caves, and 
in old buildings ; but in the dusk of 
the evening, when they see better 
than in broad daylight, they fly 
around looking for game. They live 
mostly on rats, mice, moles, squir¬ 
rels, and other small quadrupeds, 
and on other birds, and some of the 
smaller kinds eat moths, beetles, 
and other insects. They catch their 
prey with their claws and not with 
their beaks : if it is small they swal¬ 
low it whole at one gulp, the bones 
and hair or feathers being afterward 
vomited up in a ball or wad, but if 
large they first tear it into pieces. 

When by chance an owl comes 
out of its hiding place in the day¬ 
time, the little birds often attack it 
in flocks, and try to revenge them¬ 
selves on their enemy, who kills so 
many of them by night. When thus 
attacked the owl ruffles up its feath¬ 
ers, wags its head with a stupid 
look, and shows its anger by snap¬ 
ping its bill; but as it cannot see 
well enough to fight it has to bear 
the blows and picks of its persecut¬ 
ors as well as it can. In ancient 
times hunters used to take advan- 







OWL 


436 


OWL 


tage of this to catch little birds. 
After covering the twigs, bushes 
and trees with a kind of sticky glue 
called birdlime, the hunter would 
make a noise like the cry of an owl, 
and the birds, flocking together to 
fight their enemy, would perch on 
the twigs and get stuck fast, so that 
they were easily caught. 

Owls are found in almost all parts 
of the world, but, many of those in 
other countries differ from those liv¬ 
ing in the United States, where there 
are about forty kinds. Among the 
commonest American owls are the 
following : 

The Barn Owl, whose feathers are 
grayish brown mixed with yellow, 
white, and dark brown. It has no 
real cry, but makes a kind of hissing 
sound. The barn owl of Europe is 
much like it, but makes a kind of 
screech, from which it is sometimes 
called screech owl. Barn owls are 
often looked upon as birds of ill 
omen, and some people are silly 
enough to believe that when one 
appears it is a sign of death in the 
family. Such fears are foolish, for 
these birds are very harmless and 
useful, as they kill rats and mice and 
other vermin hurtful to gardens and 
crops. The barn owl is very brave : 
a pair of them have been known to 
kill a cat which had attacked their 
nest. 

The Great Horned Owl is found 
almost all over North America. It is 
about two feet high, and has on its 
head two feathery tufts standing up 
like horns, from which it gets its 
name. It makes many singular noises, 
sometimes barking like a dog, some¬ 
times coughing like a person chok¬ 
ing, and sometimes breaking out 
into a wild yell like “ Waugh O ! 
waugh O !” 

The Little Horned Owl, found 
throughout the Northern States and 
Canada, is called also the American 
screech owl, the red owl, and the 
mottled owl. It is a pert little fel¬ 
low, not more than ten inches high, 
with staring eyes and feather-tufts 


like ears. It is sometimes seen in 
winter in city parks, where it is 
drawn probably by the sparrows, 
on which it feeds. 

The Barred Owl is common in 
the Southern States. It is about 
twenty inches high, has a large 
head but rather small eyes, and no 
ear-tufts. It is a queer bird and has 
odd habits. Its cry is a kind of 
laugh, like “ Whah ! whah ! whah- 
a-a-aa !” and it may often be heard 
in the thick woods in the middle of 
the day. 

The Burrowing Owl of the wes¬ 
tern plains is so called because it 
lives in the burrows of prairie dogs. 
In India there is a kind of owl which 
digs burrows in the ground, but the 
burrowing owl of this country lives 
in holes which the prairie dogs have 
left. Most of the stories told about 
their sharing the same hole with the 
prairie dog and the rattlesnake are 
untrue. These owls prowl around in 
the daytime, feeding on grasshop¬ 
pers, crickets, and field mice. 

In ancient times the owl Was 
thought to be a very wise bird, and 
the Greeks made it the emblem of 
wisdom and sacred to Minerva, the 
goddess of wisdom. 

The Chinese and the Tartars also 
hold it in great respect, because 
Genghis Khan, the founder of their 
empire, was once saved by an owl. 
After losing a battle he was forced 
to flee from his enemies and hide 
himself in a wood. An owl perched 
in the very thicket where he was 
lying, and his pursuers, thinking 
that the owl would have been fright¬ 
ened away if he had gone in there, 
did not search that place, and so 
passed him by. For a long time the 
Chinese used to wear an owl’s feath¬ 
er in their hats, and some Tartar 
tribes still worship idols made like 
owls. 

The owl belongs to the order rap- 
tores, or birds of prey. 

The word owl is from the Anglo- 
Saxon ule, which is from the Latin 
nlula } an owl, The Romans called 







OXYGEN 


437 


OYSTER 


the owl by this name because its 
voice was something like the howl 
of a wolf, ululare meaning to 
howl. 

OXYGEN, the most abundant of 
all the elememts. At least one 
third of the solid part of the earth, 
one fifth of the air, and eight ninths 
of all the water on the globe are 
made of it. All minerals are one 
half, all animals three quarters, and 
all vegetables at least four fifths oxy¬ 
gen by weight. 

Oxygen in its usual form is a GAS 
which, like air, has neither color, 
taste, nor smell ; but it may be 
changed into a liquid by a great 
amount of cold and of pressure. It 
is a little heavier than air, and six¬ 
teen times heavier than hydrogen. 
It is not only the most abundant sub¬ 
stance in the world ; it is also one of 
the most important of all things. We 
breathe it in with the air, and it is 
the food of the LUNGS, just as the 
food which we eat is the food of the 
stomach. We could live for several 
days without eating, but we should 
die much sooner if our lung food 
were taken away. 

The most important thing about 
oxygen is that it will unite with all 
the other elements but one (fluorine). 
When HYDROGEN, CARBON, SUL¬ 
PHUR, SODIUM, and IRON, for ex¬ 
ample, are brought into contact with 
oxygen at a proper degree of heat, 
they burn, giving out heat and light, 
and forming what are called oxides 
of these substances. 

The oxide of a metal is commonly 
called rust : as iron rust and tin rust, 
but in chemistry these are called iron 
oxide or the oxide of iron and tin ox¬ 
ide or the oxide of tin. When we 
say that iron rusts, we ought really 
to say that it oxidizes, which is the 
same as saying that it burns, for all 
burning is oxidation. When wood 
burns its carbon unites with the oxy¬ 
gen of the air, and forms CARBONIC 
ACID gas. If there were no oxygen 
in the air there could of course be no 
burning, and we should be deprived 


of all the comforts and conveniences 
which we get from fire. 

We are accustomed to think that 
there must always be heat and light 
when anything burns ; but this is 
not necessary. There is no light 
and very little heat when burning 
takes place very slowly. Thus when 
iron rusts in the open air, the burn¬ 
ing is so very slow that no light is 
seen and no heat is felt. If iron is 
burned quickly in a jar of oxygen, it 
burns as freely as wood, and gives 
out both light and heat. Not only 
iron, but all the other metals, with 
the exception of gold, silver, plati¬ 
num, and a few other very rare metals 
will burn or oxidize when heated in 
the air. 

The word oxygen means the acid- 
maker, it being made up of the 
Greek oxus, acid, and genneiii , to 
make. Oxygen was given this name 
because it was once thought that all 
ACIDS were made by it. 

OYSTER. It is not known when 
oysters were first eaten, but it is cer¬ 
tain that they have been used as food 
by almost all peoples from the most 
ancient times. The Romans were 
great lovers of them, and they were 
the first to make oyster ponds in 
which they were bred and fatten.ed 
for the table. It is said that the 
Emperor Vitellius could eat a thou¬ 
sand at a meal, but they must have 
been very much smaller than Ameri¬ 
can oysters. One of the French 
kings made his cook a noble because 
he cooked oysters so well, and Na¬ 
poleon is said to have always eaten 
oysters, when he could get them, on 
the eve of his great battles. 

Oysters are found in almost all 
parts of the world, but they are not 
all alike, for there are said to be 
more than fifty kinds. Generally, 
those growing in cool climates have 
more flavor than those of hot coun¬ 
tries. They grow commonly near 
shores, in water twelve to fifty feet 
deep, generally in quiet bays or in 
the mouths of rivers. They cannot 
live in fresh water, but sometimes 




OYSTER 


438 


OYSTER 


they live a long time out of water. 
In some hot countries oysters fasten 
themselves to trees growing in the 
water, and when the tide goes out 
they are left dry, but as they have 
water enough in their shells to last 
them until the next tide, they do not 
suffer from it. 

The shell of the oyster grows in 
irregular layers, and the two sides 
are unequal. The lower side is 
larger than the upper and bulges out 
more, and it is by this that it is fast¬ 
ened to rocks, limbs of trees, or 
other things at the bottom of the sea. 
The oyster is a very simple animal, 
but it breathes and eats like other 
animals. It has two pairs of gills, by 
which it separates from the water 
the small quantity of air which it 
needs ; and, although it has no head, 
it has a mouth hidden under the 
folds of its mantle or skin, into 
which it sucks food from the water. 
Every oyster has a strong muscle 
fastened to the middle of each side 
of its shell, by-means of which it is 
able to open and to close its shell. 
This muscle has to be cut through 
with a knife before an oyster can be 
opened. 

Oysters lay great numbers of little 
yellow eggs, a single one sometimes 
laying many hundreds of thousands. 
The spawning season is in May, June, 
July, and August, during which 
months they are not so good to eat 
as at other times. It is a common 
saying that oysters are unwholesome 
in all the months which have not an 
R in their name. This notion is 
very old, being mentioned in a book 
called “ Dyet’s Dry Dinner, 4 ’ print¬ 
ed in 1599. The eggs of oysters are 
placed in the folds of the skin and are 
hatched there, and the little oysters 
do not leave the mother’s shell until 
they are able to take care of them¬ 


selves. They are so small that they are 
almost like dust, but when looked at 
through a microscope they are seen 
to have a perfect shell. During the 
spawning season the sea over an oys¬ 
ter bank is so filled with this living 
dust, or 4 4 spat, ’ ’ as the young oys¬ 
ters are called, that it is clouded. 
The spat float around until the cur¬ 
rent carries them against rocks or 
some other solid bodies, when they 
stick close to them and begin life 
like any other oyster. But only a 
small part of those that are hatched 
grow up, for millions of them are 
eaten by fishes, and unless they are 
born in still water great numbers are 
swept away by the currents. It 
takes an oyster about three years to 
grow up, and some do not reach 
their full growth before the fifth or 
sixth year. 

Oysters sometimes grow so fast 
along the low coasts and river 
banks of the Southern States that 
they fill up the channels and change 
the course of the currents. If the 
branch of a tree be put into the water 
near one of these beds, it will soon 
be covered with young oysters, and 
in two or three years will be loaded 
down with large ones. Great num¬ 
bers of small oysters, called seed 
oysters, were formerly brought every 
year from Chesapeake bay and put 
into new beds in the flats around 
New York city and in Long Island 
Sound, and many are still thus 
brought ; but most of the oyster beds 
are now supplied by the spat taken 
during spawning time and planted in 
new beds. There are miles of such 
beds in Long Island Sound, and they 
are growing larger every year. 

The oyster is an acephalous MOL- 
LUSK. 

The word oyster is from the Latin 
ostrea, Greek ostreon, oyster. 





p 


PAINT. All paints are made up 
of two things, the substance which 
makes the color, usually called the 
pigment, and that with which the 
color is mixed. Pigments are mostly 
made from minerals, but some are 
got from vegetables and some from 
animals. Whites are usually lead 
carbonate, zinc oxide, and chalk ; 
blacks are BONE-black, lamp-black, 
CORK-black, and BLACK lead ; 
browns are umber (a brown earth 
found in the island of Cyprus), Siena 
earth (found near Siena, Italy; 
sometimes burned to make a deeper 
brown), bistre (made from the soot 
of several kinds of burnt wood), 
sepia (made from the cuttle¬ 
fish), etc. ; reds are red lead 
oxide, IRON oxides, ochres (earths 
colored with iron), vermilion (see 
Mercury), carmine (see Cochi¬ 
neal), madder, etc. ; yellows are 
ochres, LEAD chromate, etc. ; blues 
are Prussian blue (see Iron), ultra- 
marine (made from a blue stone 
called lapis lazuli), smalt (made 
from the metal cobalt), indigo, 
verditer (see Copper), etc..; and 
greens are verditer, verdigris, cobalt, 
etc., but greens are usually made by 
mixing various blues and yellows. 
Paints are mixed either with oil or 
water, and are therefore called oil- 
paints and water-colors. Oil paints 
are usually mixed with linseed oil, 
but sometimes some kinds of nut 
oils are used. Linseed oil is boiled, 
before using, with some other things 
to make it dry quicker. Just before 
the paint is to be used, it is thinned 
with spirits of turpentine. Ar¬ 


tists’ colors are ground in fine oil 
and put up in little metal tubes, 
which have a cover screwed tightly 
on the top. By taking off the lid a 
little of the paint can be squeezed 
out upon the painter’s palette, and 
the rest kept safe from the air by 
screwing the cover on again. 

Water-colors are mixed with water 
and a little glue or gum. Cakes of 
water - colors, usually sold in paint 
boxes, are made by pressing the 
colors, made into a thick paste with 
water and gum, in moulds and then 
drying them in heated air ; but water- 
colors are now often put up in metal 
tubes, like oil-colors. Water-colors 
are largely used in miniature paint¬ 
ing, map coloring, and small pic¬ 
tures. Kalsomine is a mixture of 
ground chalk with water and glue, 
colored with various things. 

The word paint is from the Latin 
P ittgere, to paint. 

PALMETTO, the common name of 
the palm trees which grow in the 
United States. There are four 
kinds, but the chief one is the cab¬ 
bage palmetto, which grows in the 
South - eastern States from North 
Carolina to Florida. It is commonly 
four or five times as high as a man, 
but is sometimes higher, and more 
than a foot thick. The bud or cab¬ 
bage is sometimes eaten, and palm 
wine has been made from its juice. Its 
leaves are used for thatching buildings, 
and for making hats, baskets, mats, 
etc. As the teredo or ship-worm will 
not eat its wood, palmetto timber is 
largely used in the South for wharves 
and other buildings under water. 



PANTHER 


440 


PAPER 


The word palmetto is from the 
Spanish palmito , little palm, which 
is from the Latin palma, the palm of 
the hand, the leaves of the palm tree 
being thought to look like the palm 
of the hand. 

PANTHER. Most writers think 
that the panther is only a kind of 
LEOPARD, but some say that the 
panther is larger, stronger, and 
darker-colored than the leopard. It 
is said also to be less common than 
the leopard, and to be found only in 
Africa, while the leopard is often 
found in Asia also. In South 
America the jaguar is sometimes 
called panther, and in North 
America the couguar, puma, or cat¬ 
amount, is frequently called by the 
same name, and sometimes also 
“ painter,” which is only a corrupt 
form of panther. 

The panther is a very fierce and 
savage animal, and is much feared 
when wild, but it is said to be easily 
tamed, when taken young, and to 
then show much love for its master. 
A story is told of one which was 
given by the King of Ashantee to the 
English Governor of Cape Coast 
Castle on the west coast of Africa. 
He was a beautiful animal about two 
feet high, and of a dark yellow, 
spotted with black rosettes. He 
was so tame that he was allowed to 
roam all round the castle, and fol¬ 
lowed the Governor everywhere like 
a dog. His favorite place was at 
the window of the sitting - room, 
which overlooked the whole town. 
He used to stand there on his hind 
legs, his fore paws resting on the 
ledge of the window and his face 
between them, and watch with great 
interest every thing that passed be¬ 
low. The children used to stand 
there with him, and when he was in 
their way they would try to pull him 
down by the tail. When the Gov¬ 
ernor went to England he carried his 
pet with him in a large cage. He 
arrival safely, but died in a few 
weeks from inflammation of the 
lungs. 


The panther is a MAMMAL of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the cat family, to which 
belong also the LION, TIGER, 
LEOPARD, COUGUAR, LYNX, and 
common CAT. 

The word panther is Latin. 

PAPAW, or PAWPAW, a small 
fruit-bearing tree which grows in 
the south and south-west United 
States. It is generally four or five 
times as high as a man and about 
six inches thick. Its wood is soft 
and worthless. Its fruit, which 
ripens in September, is a pod three 
or four inches long and about an inch 
thick, and looks something like a 
banana, having a yellow skin when 
ripe. Its flesh is soft and sweeter 
than that of the banana, and has two 
rows of large flat seeds in it. 

Another kind of papaw grows in 
South and Central America and the 
West Indies. Its fruit is about ten 
inches long and five broad, and has 
a thick ribbed orange-yellow rind. 
It is usually cooked with sugar and 
lemon juice, but is sometimes eaten 
raw. The leaves are used instead of 
soap for washing clothes. The juice 
of the ripe fruit is said to be good 
for freckles, and the sap of the tree 
will make tough meat tender. 

The word papaw is from p&paya, 
the Malay name of a like tree which 
grows in the East Indies. 

PAPER. Such paper as we use 
to write and to print on was not 
known to the ancients ; but they had 
a kind of paper called papyrus, made 
from the inner bark of a rush of the 
same name, which grew in Egypt. 
Papyrus was not made like our 
paper from a pulp. The inner bark 
was peeled off in thin narrow strips 
and laid side by side so that their 
edges would lap over each other. 
The sheets were then pressed, and 
the juice of the plant made the edges 
stick together. To make thick 
paper several layers were placed one 
above the other, some being put 
crosswise. The Chinese rice paper 
is not made from rice, as one would 




PAPER 


441 


PAPER 


think from its name, but from the 
pith of a tree which grows in Asia. 
The pith is cut round and round into 
a thin slice, and then pressed out 
flat. The Chinese were the first to 
find out how to make paper as we 
make it. The Arabs learned the art 
from them, and it then spread over 
Europe ; but little paper was made 
in England before Queen Elizabeth’s 
time. Before that, people wrote 
mostly on parchment or vellum. 

Paper is now made out of many 
different things, but chiefly from 
linen and cotton rags, old paper, 
straw, and several kinds of grasses 
and woods. Bank note paper is 
made from the best linen rags ; let¬ 
ter paper from linen and cotton 
rags; paper for printing books, from 
rags and from wood ; paper for 
printing newspapers mostly from 
wood ; and wrapping paper and 
other cheap kinds from straw. 
Paper is made from all these things 
in much the same way. The mate¬ 
rial is first made into a pulp or soft 
paste that looks like starch. Paper 
rags are usually very dirty, and 
linen, cotton, and colored rags are 
all mixed together. They are first 
sorted, the linen rags being separated 
from the cotton, and the colored 
ones from the white ones. They are 
then chopped up in a machine called 
the rag-cutter, after which they pass 
through the duster, which blows out 
most of the dust from them. After 
being boiled in water with SODA and 
LIME, which takes out the color, 
grease, and dirt, they are put into 
the pulp machine. This machine is 
in three parts : the first washes the 
rags very clean, the second bleaches 
them white, and the third beats them 
into pulp. 

Waste paper is sorted and dusted 
in the same way as rags. If the 
paper has been printed on, the ink is 
taken out by boiling with soda ; it is 
then bleached and made into pulp 
like rags, but it does not take so 
long to do it. Straw is first cut up 
into small pieces and boiled with 


soda to get out the resin or gum, and 
then made into pulp in the same way 
as rags and old paper. Rye straw 
is generally used in the Eastern 
States and wheat straw in the West¬ 
ern States. For making paper pulp 
from wood, poplar and basswood are 
mostly used, because they are very 
white and have but little resin in 
them. The wood is first cut up into 
small chips by machines which can 
make forty large cart loads of wood 
into chips in a day. The chips are 
boiled with soda, which takes out 
the resin, and afterward bleached 
and made into pulp. When paper 
is made of two or three different 
materials, they are mixed in the 
pulp. Wood and straw pulp have 
always some cotton pulp put with 
them, and linen pulp is generally 
mixed with cotlon. If the paper is 
to be colored, the coloring matter is 
put into the pulp. White clay is 
also added to it, which makes the 
paper heavier, smoother, and 
thicker, but too much clay makes it 
weak and easy to break. A kind of 
glue called sizing is then put in, 
which hardens the surface of the 
paper. You could not write on 
paper made without sizing, because 
the ink would run just as it does on 
blotting paper, which has no sizing 
in it. 

In the United States paper is now 
made entirely by machinery, but as 
the machines are hard to under¬ 
stand, I shall tell how it used to be 
made by hand. The pulp is mixed 
in a vat with water 1o make it thin 
enough to spread easily. The work¬ 
man has what is called a mould, a 
frame covered with a net-work of 
very fine wires like gauze, woven 
crossways. Another kind of mould 
has the wires stretched across only 
one way, with a few cross wires to 
keep them in place. If you hold 
several sheets of writing paper up to 
the light, you will see that some look 
as if the paper was woven, like 
cloth, and in some there are many 
marks running up and down and 




PAPER 


442 


PAPER 


only a few crosswise. These marks 
are made by the wires of the 
moulds. Paper made on the first 
kind of mould is called wove 
paper, and that made on the second, 
laid paper. You will also see other 
marks in the paper called water¬ 
marks. These ought to be called 
wire-marks, because they are made 
in the same way as the other marks, 
by wires placed in the moulds so as 
to make the figures or letters wanted 
in the paper. The reason why the 
water-marks and other wire marks 
show in the paper is that the paper 
is thinner in those parts. The 
water-marks sometimes give a name 
to the paper ; thus foolscap paper 
was so called because the water¬ 
mark used to be a fool’s cap and 
bells. 

Besides the mould the workman 
has a thin frame called a deckle, 
which just fits on to the mould and 
is of the size of the sheet of paper 
to be made. The workman fits the 
deckle on to the mould, and holding 
the two in both hands dips them 
into the pulp, which covers the 
mould all over up to the deckle. He 
then shakes the whole gently so as 
to spread the pulp evenly over the 
wires, between which the water* 
drains off. The deckle is next taken 
off and the mould passed along to 
another workman called the coucher, 
while the first workman fits the 
deckle to a second mould and dips up 
another sheet of pulp. The coucher 
spreads out a sheet of felt cloth, and 
by turning the mould over lays the 
sheet of pulp flat upon it. On top 
of the sheet of pulp he spreads a 
second sheet of felt, then another 
sheet of pulp, and so on until he has 
piled up a hundred and thirty sheets, 
each between two sheets of felt. The 
whole pile is then put into a press and 
pressed until nearly all the water is 
out. The felts are next taken off and 
the sheets are pressed in a pile by 
themselves, and afterward separated 
and pressed a third time, when they 
are hung up on lines in rooms to 


dry. After drying for one day and 
night, they are sized, if the sizing 
was not put into the pulp, by being 
dipped into very thin glue water 
mixed with a little alum. The sheets 
are then pressed again, and again 
dried for several days, when they 
are finished by pressing them be¬ 
tween glazed pasteboard and hot 
metal plates or passing them through 
hot polished metal rollers. 

The mode of making paper by 
machinery is the same in principle. 
The pulp is taken up from the vat 
on a wire gauze mould, which, in¬ 
stead of being only the size of a 
sheet, as in the hand mould, is end¬ 
less and turns round two rollers just 
like the leather belt of a steam- 
engine. It has raised sides, called 
the deckles, which prevent the pulp 
from running off. The mould has a 
shaking motion like that which the 
hand-workman gives to his mould, 
which lays the pulp evenly. The 
sheet of pulp is then carried on to a 
belt of felt which passes it through 
rollers to press out the water, and 
over several other hollow rollers 
filled with hot steam, which dry it. 
Other rollers press out most of the 
wire marks and the marks made by 
the felt, and polished iron rollers 
give it a smooth and glossy surface. 
The paper, which comes from the 
machine in one long sheet, like wall 
paper, now passes to another ma¬ 
chine which cuts it into sheets. It 
is then folded and put up into quires 
for sale. It takes about three weeks 
to finish fine paper by hand ; but the 
same work is now done by machinery 
in a day, and the paper made on the 
best machines is as good as that 
made by hand. 

Paper pulp is also made into many 
other things, such as pasteboard for 
book-binding and for boxes, papier 
mache, boards to cover the sides 
and roofs of houses, ropes and 
twine, collars and cuffs, and even 
boats, water-buckets, tubs, water- 
pipes, car-wheels, and furniture. 
The Chinese and Japanese are very 





PAPER-HANGINGS 


443 


PAPIER MACHE 


skilful paper-makers, and make 
clothing, hats, shoes, pocket-hand¬ 
kerchiefs, and umbrellas out of it. 

Though linen, cotton, and hemp 
rags make the best paper, a great 
many other things have been tried 
by paper-makers. In the British 
Museum is a curious book on paper¬ 
making, made in 1775, by a German 
named Jacob Christian Schaffer, the 
sixty leaves of which are made of 
sixty different kinds of paper. 
Among them is paper made from 
the bark of the willow, beech, mul¬ 
berry, linden, and hawthorn, the 
tendrils of the grape vine, the stalks 
of the nettle, the down from the flow¬ 
ers of the black poplar, many kinds 
of leaves, and straw, reeds, moss, 
lichens, wood-shavings, sawdust, fir 
cones, and potatoes. Patents have 
been taken out both in Europe and 
the United States for making paper 
from a great number of things, but 
few of the things have proved to be 
good for much. 

Pasteboard is so called because it 
was once made by pasting sheets of 
paper together until it was thick 
enough, and then pressing it smooth ; 
but it is now made from pulp, just 
as paper is, only the pulp is much 
thicker. The pulp of yellow and 
brown pasteboard is made from 
straw, pieces of old rope, JUTE, and 
other coarse things. 

The word paper is from the Latin 
papyms, Greek fiapuros , the paper 
plant of Egypt. 

PAPER-HANGINGS, or WALL¬ 
PAPERS. The paper for paperhang- 
ings was once made by hand in square 
pieces and then pasted together to 
make rolls twelve yards long ; but it 
is now made like other paper, in long 
rolls on machines, and afterward cut 
up into the lengths wanted. Much 
more clay is put into the pulp than 
into that of other paper. In former 
times paper-hangings were printed 
with blocks or STENCIL plates, but 
most of them are now printed on 
machines, just as calicoes are 
printed. Satin paper, which has a 


shiny surface like satin, is made by 
coating the paper with powdered 
French chalk and then rubbing it 
with a brush until it is smooth. The 
printing is generally done after the 
satin face is put on. The fuzzy 
paper that feels like velvet is called 
flock paper. It is made by coating 
the paper with varnish and then 
sprinkling it with the flock, which is 
made from the shearings of woollen 
cloths from cloth mills, ground up 
and sifted until it is very fine. In 
gilded papers the pattern is first 
printed with varnish, and the gold 
leaf is then laid on ; the part which 
covers the pattern sticks fast, and 
the rest is brushed off. Some of the 
finest papers are painted by hand. 

PAPIER MACHE. The cheaper 
kind of papier mache is made of 
coarse paper pulp pressed into 
moulds, the better kind of sheets of 
paper glued or pasted together and 
pressed into moulds and then dried. 
When damp, sheets of paper thus 
pasted together can be moulded and 
pressed into any shape, and when 
dry they become so hard that they 
can be planed and filed. The sur¬ 
face is smoothed with PUMICE stone 
and then several coats of varnish 
are put on, each one being dried. 
When a fine surface is made it is 
ornamented with gilding and paint¬ 
ing, and frequently with flowers 
and other figures cut in MOTHER- 
of - pearl, silver, and other 
things. A great many articles are 
made of papier mache, such as 
trays, boxes, album and portfolio 
covers, screens, tables, chairs, and 
other furniture, and also jet buttons 
and ornaments, but they are now 
mostly out of fashion. 

A kind of papier mache called 
carton pierre ( French, stone paper) 
is made of paper pulp, whiting, and 
glue. It is used instead of plaster of 
Paris (see Gypsum) for making 
ornaments and cornices for rooms. 
Such ornaments are stronger and 
lighter than those made of plaster, 
and can be easily screwed on to 





PARCHMENT 


444 


PARROT 


walls and ceilings. Papier mach6 is 
also much used for making casts of 
type for stereotyping (see Printing) 

Papier machd is French for 
mashed paper, from papier , paper, 
and mac her, to chew. 

PARCHMENT, the skin of an ani¬ 
mal, made fit to write upon. Parch¬ 
ment is usually made of sheep-skin. 
After the wool has been scraped off 
the skin is steeped in lime-water, 
which takes out the grease. It is 
then stretched on a frame called a 
“ herse,” and scraped with a knife 
shaped like a half moon, which takes 
off the remains of flesh, dirt, etc. 
After this it is sprinkled with pow¬ 
dered chalk or quick-lime and ground 
down with PUMICE stone. Parch¬ 
ment used for covering DRUMS is 
made from the skins of asses, calves, 
or wolves, those of wolves being the 
best. 

Vellum is a fine kind of parchment 
made from the skins of calves, 
goats, or dead-born lambs. Parch¬ 
ment and vellum are much more last¬ 
ing than paper, and are largely used 
for deeds and other important law 
papers, which have to be kept a long 
time. 

The word parchment is from the 
Latin Pergamena chart a, paper of 
Pergamus, a city in Asia Minor, 
where parchment is said to have 
been first made. 

PARROT. There are about three 
hundred kinds of parrots, most of 
which live in very hot countries. 
They are found nearly all over the 
world excepting in Europe. Most 
of them have beautiful feathers, 
generally green, but sometimes blue, 
gray, red, or yellow. Their voices 
are harsh and disagreeable, and the 
woods where they live are kept lively 
with their loud cries. They are 
brighter than birds usually are, and 
may be taught to imitate all kinds of 
sounds and even to talk. Parrots 
use their hooked bills as well as their 
claws in climbing trees, and use 
their feet like hands to carry their 
food to their mouth. They live 


chiefly on fruits and seeds. The 
paroquet, macaw, and cockatoo are 
kinds of parrots. There are many 
parrots in Central and South 
America, but the only kind in the 
United States is the Carolina parrot, 
a bluish-green bird, with a white bill. 
It is found mostly in the southern 
and south-western States, but has 
been seen as far north as Michigan. 

The parrots usually kept as pets 
are the green South American par¬ 
rot, and the gray parrot with scar¬ 
let tail, from West Africa. The 
gray parrot is noted for its tameness, 
mischievousness, and power of imi¬ 
tating sounds. It can be taught to 
sing songs and to speak long sen¬ 
tences. Parrots will live seventy- 
five years, and some have reached 
nearly a hundred years. 

Many wonderful stories are told 
about parrots. It is said that in the 
sixteenth century a cardinal paid a 
large sum for a parrot because it 
could say the Apostles’ Creed ; and 
another parrot is said to have taken 
the place of the chaplain on a ship, 
and to have gone through with the 
prayers and the litany to the sailors. 
Goldsmith tells a story of a parrot 
belonging to King Henry VIII., 
which, being kept in a room on the 
bank of the River Thames, had 
learned to repeat many things which 
it heard the boatmen say. One day 
it fell into the river, and began to 
call out in a loud voice : “ A boat! 
a boat! twenty pounds to save me !” 
A waterman, thinking some one was 
drowning, jumped into the water and 
swam to where he heard the sound, 
and was surprised to find it was 
only a bird. Finding that it was the 
King’s parrot, he carried it to the 
palace and claimed the reward, 
which the King paid. 

Another parrot would always 
laugh when told to do so, and then 
say, when it had done, “Oh, the 
great fool who made me laugh !’’ 
A man who kept glassware for sale 
had a parrot which always cried 
out, when its master broke any 







PARSLEY 


445 


PAVEMENT 


thing, “ Awkward brute, he never 
does any thing else !” A gray par¬ 
rot belonging to an English gentle¬ 
man would ask for every thing it 
wanted and give orders ; and would 
sing several songs, and whistle some 
airs well, always beating time with 
its foot. When it sang or whistled 
a wrong note, it would stop and go 
it all over again, and never made 
the same mistake twice. 

The parrot belongs to the order 
scansores , or climbing BIRDS. 

The word parrot is from the 
French fterroquet , which is from 
Pierrot, a short form of Pierre, 
Peter. 

PARSLEY, a common garden 
plant, whose leaves are much used 
for seasoning soups and for dress¬ 
ing dishes. It was first brought 
from the south of Europe, but now 
grows well almost anywhere in the 
United States. Its leaves contain a 
fragrant oil the smell of which will 
hide other odors, for which reason 
they are often chewed after eating 
onions. 

The word parsley is from the old 
English fterseley, French persil, 
which is from the Latin petroseli- 
num , rock-parsley, from the Greek 
petros , rock, and selinon, parsley. 

PARSNIP, a common plant, culti¬ 
vated for the sake of its root, which 
is used for food both for men and 
cattle. It grows wild in southern 
Europe and in parts of Asia, but 
not in the United States. The flesh 
of cattle fed on parsnips is excellent, 
and the butter of cows fed on them 
is better than that made by other 
kinds of winter feeding. In Ireland 
a fermented (see Beer) liquor, and 
in some countries a kind of marma¬ 
lade and a wine, are made from them. 

The word parsnip is changed from 
pastnip, which is from the Latin 
pastinaca , a parsnip. It is some¬ 
times spelled parsnep. 

PARTRIDGE, the common name 
of a family of birds which includes 
also the quail. It is found almost 
all over the world, but there are no 


true partridges in the United States. 
The bird called partridge in New 
England is the ruffed GROUSE, and 
the one called partridge in the South 
is the QUAIL. The true partridge, 
of which there are several kinds, is 
found in southern Europe and in 
parts of Asia and Africa. Its flesh 
is much liked, and the bird is the de¬ 
light of the sportsman. 

The word partridge is in French 
perdrix, which is from the Latin 
perdix , a partridge. 

PASTE. Common paste used by 
bill-stickers, paper-hangers, book¬ 
binders, and others, is made by mix¬ 
ing about half a pound of wheat 
flour with a quart of cold water. A 
little powdered alum is then put in, 
or, if it is to be used by bookbinders, 
a little powdered resin, which adds to 
its stickiness. The mixture is then 
boiled, care being taken to stir it to 
keep it from burning, until it is of 
the right thickness. This is the 
kind of paste used by passe-partout 
makers to stick paper to glass. 

Polishing Pastes are mixtures of 
rotten stone, emery, lard, soft soap, 
olive-oil, etc., used for polishing 
iron, brass, pewter, and other metals. 

Glass Paste is a fine kind of glass 
of different colors, used for making 
false precious stones. The glass 
most used is called strass, German 
stras, named after the man who first 
found it out. This can be colored 
with oxides of metals (see Oxygen) 
so perfectly that the false stones can 
scarcely be told from the real ones. 

The word paste is from the old 
French paste, Italian and Spanish 
pasta , dough or soft clay. 

PAVEMENT, a hard covering for 
streets, walks, and floors. In streets 
where there is much travel great care 
must be taken to have a good pave¬ 
ment ; and many different kinds of 
materials have been used for this 
purpose in many different ways. In 
some places bricks are used, in others 
iron and wood blocks, in others 
stones in different shapes, and in 
others various things mixed with 







PAVEMENT 


446 


PEACH 


ASPHALTUM Or with CEMENT. 
Bricks are too soft for streets where 
heavy wagons pass, and soon wear 
out ; iron blocks are too hard, soon 
become slippery, and make much 
noise ; wooden blocks are easy to 
ride over, and almost noiseless, but 
are apt to become slippery and to 
decay soon ; and many kinds of 
stone pavements either become slip¬ 
pery or wear into ruts. In this 
country cobble-stones, or round 
stones found among the gravel of sea 
beaches and river sands, have been 
much used. They make a good 
foothold for horses, but are apt to 
get out of place, and streets laid 
with them often need mending. 
The best and most lasting pave¬ 
ments in the streets of cities in the 
United States have been those made 
of stone blocks set close together. 
Several sizes of stones have been 
tried. The Russ pavement, once 
much used in New York, was made 
of blocks of granite nearly square, 
but it wore smooth and became slip¬ 
pery. The Belgian pavement, made 
of smaller blocks, is better, and is 
much used in many cities ; but the 
best is that called the Guidet pave¬ 
ment, made of narrow blocks set on 
edge. This is the pavement now 
laid in Broadway, New York. 

Pavements made of a mixture of 
asphaltum, gravel, and broken rock, 
have been tried in many cities in the 
United States, but have usually 
failed in streets where there is much 
travel. But such pavements have 
been more successful in France, and 
it is thought that good and lasting 
roads will soon be made in this way. 
They are very easy to ride over, and 
are not so noisy as stone. A kind 
of asphalt called grahamite, much 
used in this country for road-making, 
is brought from West Virginia. 
Sidewalks are mostly paved with 
flagstones, a kind of sandstone which 
splits easily, but some cities are 
largely paved with brick, and some¬ 
times very large and costly slabs of 
granite are used. Some walks, es¬ 


pecially in and around parks, are 
made of gravel, broken stones, and 
sand, mixed with cement or asphalt¬ 
um. Pavements of houses, court¬ 
yards, etc., are sometimes made of 
marble slabs, MOSAICS, or TILES. 

The word pavement is from the 
Latin pavimentum, pavement, from 
flavire, to beat or ram down. 

PEA, the common name of the 
fruit of the pea vine, much cultivat¬ 
ed for food. The pea vine is supposed 
to have been first brought from the 
East. It was known to the Greeks 
and Romans, but was not cultivated 
in England until the time of Henry 
VIII. (i509-’47). It was brought to 
this country by the early settlers. 
There are about fifty kinds of peas, 
which differ only slightly from each 
other : some are smooth and some 
are wrinkled, some are green when 
ripe and some are yellow or yellow¬ 
ish white, some are early and some 
are late, and some are sweeter than 
others. Garden peas are usually 
eaten before they are ripe, but field 
peas are allowed to ripen. When 
dry the vines are gathered and peas 
threshed out; the vines are fed to 
sheep and cattle, and the peas them¬ 
selves to sheep and swine. Dry 
peas have the outer shell rubbed off 
by a machine, and the inner part 
then splits into two, and makes split 
peas, so much used for making 
soups. In some countries peas are 
ground into meal and made into 
cakes. As an article of food peas 
are very valuable, as they are more 
than half made up of starch and 
casein (see Food). 

What is called the cow pea in the 
South is more like a bean than a pea 
in its looks. It is highly esteemed 
as a food for cattle. The sweet 
pea, much cultivated in gardens for 
its pretty flowers, which are white, 
pink, scarlet, purple, blue, etc., was 
first brought from Sicily. 

The word pea is from the Anglo- 
Saxon Latin ftisum, pea. 

PEACH, the fruit of a tree of 
the same kind with the almond, apri- 




PEACH 


447 


PEACOCK 


cot, plum, and cherry. The peach 
differs from the nectarine only in 
having a rough instead of a 
smooth skin ; that is, the nectarine 
is simply a smooth-skinned peach. 
There are freestones and clingstones 
among nectarines, as well as among 
peaches. The peach tree is of medi¬ 
um size, being seldom more than 
three or four times as high as a 
man. It is largely cultivated in Del¬ 
aware, Maryland, Virginia, and New 
Jersey, and immense quantities of 
peaches are sent in baskets and 
crates from those States to the north¬ 
ern markets. There are also large 
peach orchards in Michigan and 
Illinois, which supply the western 
cities, and very fine peaches are 
raised in the southern States and in 
California. About a basket of fruit 
is usually got from each tree. The 
peaches are picked when they are 
still hard, for if allowed to ripen on 
the tree they would be too soft when 
they reach market. Great quanti¬ 
ties are preserved by canning and 
drying. The cans are of tin, and are 
made very cheaply by machinery. 
The peaches, peeled and cut into 
halves, are put into them through a 
round hole in the top, and syrup is 
then poured in until the places be¬ 
tween are all filled. The cover, 
which has a small hole pricked in it, 
is then soldered on by melting SOL¬ 
DER with a hot iron. The heat of 
the iron swells the air in the top and 
drives it out of the little hole, which 
is then closed with some solder. 
The cans are next lowered into a 
vat of water, and heated boiling hot. 
If air bubbles escape from a can, it is 
taken out ; those from which no air 
is seen to rise are left in until heated 
through, when they are removed, al¬ 
lowed to cool, and packed in boxes 
for sale. Tomatoes and other fruits 
are canned in the same way. 

Dried peaches are made by slicing 
them and drying them in the sun, in 
ovens, or in rooms heated by stoves. 
Those dried in the sun are much 
darker colored than the others, and 


are not so good. Peach brandy is 
made by pressing out the juice of the 
fruit, letting it ferment, and then 
distilling (see Alcohol). Fresh 
peach leaves have the taste and 
smell of bitter almonds. Peach 
water, much used for flavoring in 
cookery, is made by bruising them, 
mixing the pulp with water, and dis¬ 
tilling it. 

The word peach is in French 
fteche, Italian per sic a, from the Lat¬ 
in malum Persicum , Persian apple, 
the fruit having been first brought 
to Europe from Persia. 

PEACOCK. This splendid bird 
has been known since the most an¬ 
cient times. It was one of the pre¬ 
cious things brought from Asia by 
King Solomon’s ships, and it was 
probably carried into Europe by 
Alexander the Great on his return 
from India. When first seen in 
Athens it is said to have brought to¬ 
gether great crowds of people, who 
came in from the country to see it; 
but in time it became plentiful both 
in Greece and Italy, and then spread 
all over Europe. 

The peacock is one of the most 
beautiful of birds, but the peahen, 
as the female is called, is not at all 
handsome, being of a brownish 
color, something like the hen turkey. 
The peacock is elegant in form and 
graceful in its movements ; its head 
has a splendid crest of feathers ; its 
feathers are generally of a bluish 
green with bronze shadings, and its 
tail, which is very large, is of 
emerald green, purple, and gold, 
studded with richly shaded eyes. 
In the spring the peacock struts, 
spreads its tail, and takes great de¬ 
light in showing its splendors. But 
at the end of summer it loses its fine 
plumage, which does not come out 
again till spring. Sometimes white 
peacocks, or white mixed with other 
colors, are seen, but they are not 
common. The cry of the peacock 
is very harsh and loud. 

Wild peacocks are still plentiful in 
the forests of India. When hunted 




PEANUT 


448 


PEAR 


they often get away by running, 
which they can do very fast, but they 
cannot fly very well. They roost on 
the limbs of the highest trees, but 
make their nests on the ground. 
Tame peacocks also love to get up 
as high as they can, and they take 
pleasure in flying to the tops of the 
loftiest buildings. They sometimes 
do much mischief to roofs by tearing 
up tiles and shingles. 

The feathers of the peacock are 
much used for trimming clothes and 
fans, and for ornamental brushes. 
Its flesh was much eaten in ancient 
times. The Romans used to think 
it a great delicacy, and the emperors 
used to have dishes served at their 
feasts made entirely of the brains 
and tongues of peacocks ; but pea¬ 
cocks are not much eaten now, as 
their flesh is not so good as that of 
the turkey and other fowls. 

The peacock belongs to the order 
rasores, or scratching BIRDS, and to 
the pheasant family. 

The word peacock is made up of 
pea, Anglo - Saxon fidwa, Latin 
fiavo , peafowl, and cock, Anglo- 
Saxon coc , the male of any fowl. 

PEANUT, the fruit of a leguminous 
PLANT common in warm countries. 
It is sometimes called also ground 
pea and ground or earth nut, and in 
the southern States gouber or gou- 
ber nut. Still another name for it 
is pindal or pindar, and in western 
Africa it is called mandubi. The 
plant is a trailing vine, with small 
yellow flowers. After the flowers 
fall the flower stem grows longer, 
bends downward, and the pod on 
the end forces itself into the ground, 
where it ripens. 

Peanuts are raised in immense 
quantities on the west coast of 
Africa, in South America, and in 
the southern United States. The 
vines are dug up with pronged hoes 
or forks, dried for a few days, and 
then stacked for about two weeks to 
cure. The pods are picked by hand 
from the vines, cleaned in a fanning 
mill, and sometimes bleached with 


sulphur, and then packed in bags 
for market. Peanuts are sometimes 
eaten raw, but usually roasted or 
baked. In Africa and South 
America they form one of the chief 
articles of food. Large quantities 
of them are made into an oil much 
like olive oil, and which is used in 
the same way. It is also largely 
used in the manufacture of soap. 
A bushel of peanuts, when pressed 
cold, will make a gallon of oil; if 
heat is used, more oil is made, but it 
is not so good. In Spain peanuts 
are ground up and mixed with choco¬ 
late. Peanut vines make good food 
for cattle. 

The peanut probably gets its name 
from the shape of its pods, which 
are like those of the pea. 

PEAR, the fruit of a tree of the 
same family with the apple. The 
pear is one of the best and most val¬ 
uable fruits of mild climates. The 
tree grows wild in Europe and in the 
mild parts of Asia, but there were 
no pear trees in America until they 
were brought here by the early 
settlers. The wild pear is either a 
shrub or a very small tree, with 
thorns, and bearing small puckery 
fruit ; but the cultivated tree is often 
larger than the apple tree, with a 
trunk sometimes nearly a yard in 
thickness. 

There are many kinds of pears, 
more than 1000 of which grow in the 
United States, but only a few kinds 
are raised for market. Among the 
most popular kinds cultivated here 
are the Bartlett, which is early, and 
the Seckel (wrongly called Sickle by 
many), which ripens in the autumn. 
The Bartlett was first raised in Eng¬ 
land about one hundred years ago 
by a man named Williams, and it is 
known there by his name ; but it 
was first made known here by a Mr. 
Bartlett, of Boston, and has always 
been called after him. The Seckel 
is an American pear, supposed to 
have first grown from the seed. 
Besides these there are several kinds 
called winter pears, which are picked 




PEARL 


449 


PEARL 


when frosty weather begins, and 
ripened indoors. Pears are pre¬ 
served by canning like PEACHES, or 
dried. An agreeable drink called 
perry is made from them in the same 
way that cider is made from apples. 
The wood of the pear tree is hard 
and close-grained, and is used by 
turners, and by engravers for coarse 
work. It is also sometimes dyed 
black and used by cabinet makers 
for ebony. 

The word pear is in French poire, 
and is from the Latin pirum, pear. 

PEARL, a round substance found 
within the shell of the pearl oyster 
or some other shell-fish, and used as 
a jewel. The pearl oyster grows in 
beds much like the common oyster. 
The shell, both the outside and in¬ 
side of which are shown in the pic¬ 
tures, is nearly round. The outside 
is rough and greenish, and the in¬ 
side is covered in all parts with na¬ 
cre, or mother-of-pearl. Pearls, 
which are of the same material as 
mother-of-pearl, are found both 
fastened to the shell and loose in the 
flesh of the oyster. Ten or twelve 
of different sizes are often found in 
one shell, and sometimes as many as 



Pearl Oyster Shell, Outside. 


twenty. It is not known exactly 
how they are formed, but it is 
thought that some substance like a 
grain of sand gets into the mantle 
(see MOLLUSK) of the oyster, and 
that some of the mother-of-pearl col¬ 


lects on it and thus forms a round 
pearl. The Chinese are said to 
force oysters to make pearls by put¬ 
ting small beads made out of mother- 
of-pearl into the shells of live oysters 
and then putting the oysters back 



Pearl Oyster Shell, Inside. 


again into the sea, where they soon 
cover the beads and make them into 
large pearls. They also put in little 
metal images of their gods, and they 
are thus changed into beautiful pearl 
ones. 

The best pearls are found off the 
coast of Ceylon and in the Persian 
Gulf. The oysters are brought up 
from the bottom of the sea by divers, 
who are let down from a boat, and 
sometimes stay two minutes under 
water. They cut off the oysters 
from the rocks to which they grow, 
put them in a basket or net, and 
then give a signal and are hauled up 
by a rope into the boat. The oyster 
boats carry their cargoes to the 
shore, where the oysters are piled up 
in the hot sun, and left until they 
have rotted and dried. When dry 
the oysters are opened and washed 
with sea-water in a trough, when 
the pearls are easily found. 

Pearls are separated according to 
their sizes by passing them through 
twelve copper sieves, one above the 
other, each with different sized holes. 
They are thus divided into three 
classes, the last of which are small, 
and are called seed pearls. Seed 
pearls are sold by measure or 




PEARL 


450 


PELICAN 


weight, but large ones are sold by 
number. Pearls are also divided ac¬ 
cording to shape and color, in which 
they differ greatly. Rough and 
badly shaped ones are sometimes 
ground round and polished, but 
those which are round or nearly 
round are left as they are. The 
taste of different peoples differs in re¬ 
gard to the color of pearls : Euro¬ 
peans like pure white ones best, but 
the Ceylonese prefer rose-tinted 
ones, and the people of India yellow 
ones. 

Pearls are found in other shell fish 
than the pearl oyster, though the 
pearl oyster has in it the finest white 
ones. Pink pearls, which are valued 
more highly than white ones because 
they are more rare, are got from 
conch shells, found mostly in the 
West Indies and Panama. Black 
pearls, which are still more rare and 
costly, are found in several kinds of 
shells. Some pearls have been 
found in common mussel shells. 
One was found in a brook in New 
Jersey in 1858 and sold for $2000. 

Pearls have been prized in all ages 
of the world. Cleopatra is said to 
have owned two very large and beau¬ 
tiful ones. She melted one of them 
in vinegar and drank it, though it 
was worth, some writers say, $300,- 
000. The other one was cut in two 
and made into ear-rings for the 
statue of the Capitoline Venus in 
Rome. Julius Caesar, who was a 
great lover of pearls, paid $240,000 
for one, and he carried back to 
Rome many fine ones from Britain. 
Many splendid pearls are owned by 
different crowned heads in Europe, 
but the Shah of Persia is said to 
have the finest ones. 

Artificial Pearls, or false pearls, 
are made of hollow glass beads, cov¬ 
ered on the inside with what is called 
essence of pearl. This is made from 
the scales of dace, roach, and some 
other small fishes, which when 
soaked in water give off a kind of 
pearly film. The pearl essence is 
mixed with a little isinglass and 


blown while hot into each bead by 
means of a little glass tube. When 
dry the beads are. filled with white 
wax, which gives them weight and 
makes them less easy to break. 
These pearls are made so perfectly 
in Paris that they can scarcely be told 
from real pearls. Roman pearls are 
colored with the scales of a small 
fish like the smelt, found only in the 
Tiber. They are used mostly for 
beads. 

The word pearl is Anglo-Saxon. 

PEAT, a vegetable substance made 
up of partly decayed roots, stems, 
and leaves of plants. When dried it 
is often used for fuel in countries 
where wood and coal are scarce and 
dear. Peat is found mostly in cold 
countries, as vegetation in very hot 
countries rots too quickly to form it. 
Some peat is red or black, but the 
best is dark brown or snuff-color, 
and is quite thick and heavy. It is 
dug out of bogs or swamps, and has 
to be dried before it is fit for fuel. 
When very soft it is sometimes 
worked into a paste and moulded 
into cakes or blocks. Machines have 
been made to grind peat to a pulp 
and then to press part of the water 
out by passing it between iron roll¬ 
ers. The paste is then moulded 
into bricks and dried, either in the 
sun, or by furnaces. This makes 
good fuel, but it is not so cheap as 
coal. See Rocks. 

Peat is made into charcoal, which 
is better than wood charcoal for 
smelting iron. It yields also a good 
gas, which burns almost as well as 
coal gas, and several other useful 
things, such as acids, oils, naphtha, 
and tar. 

The word peat is from the old 
English beat or beating , turf foi 
fuel. 

PELICAN, a large web - footed 
water bird, remarkable for its long 
and broad bill with a pouch or bag 
under it. Pelicans live along the 
\shores of seas, lakes, and rivers, 
and feed entirely on fish. They are 
strong flyers, and hover over the 





PEN 


45i 


PEN 


water in flocks, swooping down on 
their prey whenever they see a fish, 
and storing it in their pouch until it 
is full, when tlseygo to some lonely 
place to eat it. They are very 
greedy, and it is said that one of 
them will eat in a day food enough 
for six men. Some kinds of pelicans 
live in Africa, some in Asia, and 
some in Eastern Europe. There are 
two kinds in the United States—the 
white pelican, which is found in win¬ 
ter along the Gulf coast, and which 
in summer goes up the rivers to the 
Rocky Mountains, and the brown 
pelican, which lives all the year 
round on the Southern coast. The 
flesh of the pelican is eaten by 
negroes and Indians, but it has a 
strong, fishy taste, and is very tough. 
The pelican is the emblem of the 
State of Louisiana, and is represented 
on the State seal as sitting on its 
nest feeding its young. 

In old times it was thought that 
the pelican feeds its young, when 
food is scarce, with blood drawn 
from its own breast, and pictures are 
sometimes seen in which it is shown 
doing this. This silly story rose 
from the fact that this bird feeds its 
young by pressing the red point of 
its bill against its breast, which 
brings up the fish from its pouch. 
The male does the same thing to feed 
the female when sitting. 

The pelican belongs to the order 
natatores , or swimming BIRDS. 

The word pelican is from the Latin 
elecanus , pelican. 

PEN. In ancient times pens were 
made out of reeds, but after paper 
came into use they were made from 
quills, mostly those of the goose, but 
sometimes of the swan, crow, 
turkey, and ostrich. Quills for pens 
are plucked from the wings of live 
geese, each wing furnishing about 
five good quills. They are at first 
tough and soft, and covered with a 
kind of skin, so that they cannot be 
slit evenly ; but after heating in hot 
sand, which dries up the oil in them, 
the skin cracks and peels off. This, 


which is called “ dutching,” because 
it is supposed to have been first done 
in Holland, gives them the color of 
thin. hoxn. They are then dipped 
in boiling hot alum water or weak 
nitric acid. The quills, thus pre¬ 
pared, are tied up into bundles for 
sale. When made into pens, they 
are cut by hand by the pen-cutter’s 
knife. Quill pens are now out of 
fashion, but are still used by many 
people, because they write smoother 
than steel pens. 



Steel with Blanks cut out. 


Steel Pens are made from sheets of 
fine STEEL rolled to the right thick¬ 
ness, and cut into slips wide enough 
to cut out two rows of pens placed 
end to end, as shown in the first 
picture. The flat pieces thus cut 
out are called blanks. 

The blank for a common 
pen is shown in the sec¬ 
ond picture, and for a 
barrel or round pen in 
the third picture. The 
next operation is to cut 
the two side slits, which 
make the pen more lim¬ 
ber. These are cut by 
punches, worked by 
hand. Then the long 
hole between these slits, 
made to hold the ink, is 
punched in the same 
way. The blanks are next softened 


Blank for 
Common 
Pen. 






















































PENCIL 


452 


PENCIL 


by heating, when the maker’s name, 
and the number or let¬ 
ter of the pen, is stamp¬ 
ed on the back, and 
they are then rounded 
by being stamped be¬ 
tween two dies, one 
of which fits into the 
other. Barrel pens are 
first stamped in the 
same kind of a die, 
and then in another in 
which both the upper 
and the lower sides are 
hollowed out. The 
blanks,which have now 
_ the form of pens, are 

Blank for then hardened by heat- 
Barrel Pen. ing them red hot and 
cooling them suddenly 
in oil. They are next whirled round 
very fast in a barrel with sand and 
emery, which cleans and brightens 
them. The nibs or points are then 
ground on an emery wheel, after 
which the slit is cut. This is the 
most important part of the work, 
and is done by two sharp punches, 
one fixed below and one above, the 
edges of which come together like 
scissors. Th'e pens are now heated 
in a metal barrel, which turns round 
over a charcoal fire, until they are of 
the right color. After cooling they 
are glazed with a kind of varnish, 
and when dry are put up into 
boxes. 

Gold Pens are made in nearly the 
same way as steel pens ; but the nibs 
are made hard by soldering on to 
them little pieces of iridium, one of 
the hardest of the metals. The 
points are then ground down on an 
emery wheel, and the pens are fin¬ 
ished by cleaning them in weak nitric 
acid and by polishing them on a 
wheel. 

The word pen is from the Latin 
penna, a feather or quill. 

PENCIL. There are four kinds 
of pencils : those made of hair, of 
black lead, of chalk, and of slate. 
Hair pencils, which are used for 
drawing and painting in oil or water 


colors, are told about in the article 
Brush. 

Lead Pencils are made from 
graphite or BLACK lead. Before 
this mineral was found out pencils 
were made of common lead, which 
will make a light mark on paper. 
When graphite, which has no lead in 
it, was first used, the mark made by 
it was so much blacker than that of 
common lead, that it was called 
black lead, and the pencils, made 
from it black lead pencils, to dis¬ 
tinguish them from common lead 
pencils. 

In making leads for pencils in 
former times the graphite was ground 
and made into a paste with water, 
and then pressed into blocks, which 
were afterwards sawn up into square 
sticks. Each lead was set into a 
groove cut in the side of a square 
wooden stick, another piece of wood 
was glued on top of it, and when dry 
the pencil was turned round in a 
lathe. This is the mode of making 
pencils described in almost all other 
cyclopaedias, but most of the lead 
pencils now in use are made in a 
different way. 

The best lead pencils are now made 
in the United States, the purest black 
lead being found here. The black 
lead, which is brought from the 
mine in lumps, is crushed fine under 
water, on the top of which it floats 
/Off. It is then floated through seve¬ 
ral tanks or tubs, each of which is 
lower than the one before it. The 
coarsest grains settle to the bottom 
of the first tub, the next coarsest to 
the bottom of the next, and so on 
until the finest grains are all in the 
last tub. For very fine pencils only 
the settlings of the last tub are used, 
but for common ones the settlings 
of the two tubs before the last will 
do. The graphite is next mixed 
with a kind of pipe-CLAY brought 
from Germany, enough water being 
put in to make it about as thick as 
cream, and this is ground together 
until it is perfectly mixed. The clay 
makes the difference between soft 










PENCIL 


453 


PEPPER 


and hard pencils. In hard pencils 
the lead is made of half clay and half 
graphite, but in medium ones there 
are about seven parts of clay to ten 
parts of graphite. 

Alter grinding, the mixture is put 
into CANVAS bags and pressed until 
the water runs out and leaves it a 
thick dough. This is put into a 
small iron cylinder or barrel, which 
has a tight-fitting piston or plunger 
Working up and down in it. In the 
bottom of the barrel is a small hole 
of the size and shape of the lead 
wanted, and through this the lead is 
slowly forced, coming out in a long 
piece which coils up like a coil of 
wire on a board beneath. This is 
cut up into pieces, which are straight¬ 
ened and hardened by baking, when 
they are ready to be put into the 
wood cases. 

The cases are made of a soft, 
close-grained CEDAR which grows 
along the coast of Florida. This is 
the best wood in the world for this 
use, and much is sent to Europe to 
be made there into pencils. It is 
sawed up at saw mills in Florida 
into little thin boards of the length 
and half the thickness of a pencil, 
each piece being wide enough for 
making six pencils. Each one of 
these is run through a machine 
which smooths one side of it and 
cuts six grooves or places for the 
leads at the same time. 

The putting in of the leads is done 
by girls. One girl takes up one of 
the little boards, lays leads in the six 
grooves, and passes it to a second 
one, who puts over it another board, 
which has been smeared with hot 
glue by a third girl. The boards 
are then screwed up tight in an iron 
frame and left to dry. When dry 
the ends are ground smooth on a 
wheel covered with sandpaper, and 
the boards are then put one by one 
into a machine which cuts away all 
the waste wood and shapes the six 
pencils on one side. The boards 
then go through another like ma¬ 
chine which shapes them on the 


other side, and they fall into a basket 
—six pencils all ready for varnishing 
and stamping. Some pencils are 
made round and some six-sided. Col¬ 
ored pencils are dyed and afterwards 
varnished, but those of the natural 
color of the wood are only varnished. 
They are then stamped with the 
maker’s name and the letters or fig¬ 
ures which mark their hardness or 
softness, and packed for sale. 

Chalk Pencils are made in much 
the same way, only different colored 
chalks are used instead of black 
lead. The chalk is ground up with 
a little hot wax, and then made into 
strips of the right size. 

Slate Pencils are thin strips, of 
SLATE cut out and afterward 
rounded. The strips are sometimes 
cut very thin and put into wood cas¬ 
ings like lead pencils. 

The word pencil is from the Latin 
penicillum , a little tail, and was first 
given to hair pencils on account of 
their looks. 

PENNYROYAL, a fragrant herb. 
European pennyroyal is a kind of 
mint, but the common pennyroyal 
which grows in the United States is 
not a mint, though its smell is much 
like that of the European plant, and 
its uses are similar. A tea made 
from it is sometimes used as a medi¬ 
cine, especially by country people. 
The oil of pennyroyal is said to be 
ood to drive away mosquitoes and 
ies, but this is doubtful. 

PEPPER, a kind of spice, the dried 
berry of a climbing shrub, which 
grows wild in the East Indies, but is 
now cultivated in most hot countries. 
The best pepper is brought from 
Malabar, in India, and a poorer kind 
from Java and Sumatra. The ber¬ 
ries are about as large as a pea, and 
grow in clusters of twenty or thirty, 
something like a bunch of currants. 
They are first green, then turn red, 
and then yellow ; when dried they 
become black and wrinkled. Each 
plant gives about ten pounds of pep¬ 
per berries for ten or fifteen years, 
when a new plant is set out. Black 




PERCH 


454 


PERFUMES 


pepper and white pepper come from 
the same berries. Black pepper is 
made by grinding the berries simply 
dried ; white pepper is made from 
the same berries by soaking them 
in water and rubbing off the outer 
covering. White pepper is not so 
strong as black. 

Cayenne Pepper, first brought 
from Cayenne, in South America, is 
made from the pod of the capsicum 
plant, an entirely different kind of 
shrub from that which bears black 
pepper. The pod is green at first, 
but bright orange or scarlet when 
ripe, and this gives the pepper its 
red color. Green capsicum is used 
for^pickling ; only the ripe dry pods 
are'ground for pepper. 

The word pepper is from the 
Anglo-Saxon pepor , Latin piper , 
pepper. 

PERCH, a small fish found in 
both fresh and salt water. The 
fresh water perch is found in most 
of the Northern and Middle States 
and Canada. It is greenish yellow 
on the back and bright yellow on the 
sides, and grows ten to fifteen inches 
long. There is also a white perch 
found in some streams and ponds. 
Perch fishing is very pretty sport, 
as this fish is a quick biter and sel¬ 
dom nibbles at the bait. Angle- 
worms make good bait, but min¬ 
nows are also good. A small line 
and medium-sized pole will do to 
fish with. 

The Salt Water Perch is variously 
called, in different parts of the United 
States, cunner or Conner, chogset, 
blue perch, burgall, and nibbler. 
It is six to fifteen inches long, and 
is generally bluish brown, but is 
sometimes reddish or coppery, or 
greenish, with black spots. It is a 
very sweet pan fish, but is not much 
fished for by fishermen, who dislike 
it because it steals their bait when 
they are after black fish and other 
large fish. 

The word perch is in Latin perca, 
Greek perke , from the Greek per- 
kos, dark-colored. 


PERFUMES, scents made from 
sweet smelling substances. They 
are made chiefly from vegetables, 
but some from animals. Vegetable 
perfumes are made from flowers, 
such as the rose, tuberose, and 
violet; from herbs, such as laven¬ 
der, peppermint, rosemary, and 
wintergreen ; from certain fruits, 
such as the orange, lemon, and ber¬ 
gamot ; from spices, such as cinna¬ 
mon, cloves, and nutmeg; from 
various woods, such as sassafras, 
cedar, and sandal wood ; from 
roots, such as orris root; from 
seeds, such as caraway, dill, and 
aniseed ; from gums, such as cam¬ 
phor, myrrh, and styrax ; and from 
certain nuts, such as bitter almonds 
and vanilla. Perfumes from ani¬ 
mals are musk, ambergris, harts¬ 
horn, etc. Besides these, there are 
some perfumes obtained from filthy 
and bad-smelling materials, such as 
gas tar and the drainings of cow¬ 
houses. 

Perfumes are made in many ways. 
Dry perfumes, such as incense and 
sachet powders, are simply gums, 
resins, dried herbs, etc., pounded or 
ground to powder. Liquid per¬ 
fumes are mostly distilled (see Al¬ 
cohol) from the different parts of 
plants. Such perfumes are called 
essential OILS, and sometimes ottos, 
from the Turkish word attar (see 
Rose). But the perfumes made 
from flowers, such as are used on 
the handkerchief, are mostly made 
not by distillation, but in two other 
ways, called maceration (Latin mac- 
eratio , steeping or soaking), and ab¬ 
sorption (Latin absorptio , sucking 
up). In the first way fresh flowers 
are put into hot fat or oil and left to 
stand a few hours, when the fat is 
again heated, the flowers strained 
out, and fresh ones put in. This is 
kept up for several days, when the 
fat will be found to be filled with the 
perfume of the flowers. Some flow¬ 
ers, such as jasmine and tuberose, 
are so delicate that their perfume is 
injured by heat, and these are 





PERSIMMON 


455 


PETROLEUM 


treated in the second way, or by ab¬ 
sorption. In this a layer of some 
kind of grease, such as beef-suet or 
lard, is spread over the bottom of a 
glass frame with wooden sides about 
four inches high. On this grease 
the fresh blossoms are laid, and the 
frames are then piled up one above 
the other, so that those on top make 
covers for the under ones. Fresh 
flowers are put in every day or two 
as long as the flower is in bloom, 
but the grease is not changed. At 
the end of the flower season the 
grease, which will be found to have 
taken up a great part of the scent of 
the flowers, is scraped off, melted, 
strained, and put into tin cans. 
Sometimes cotton cloths soaked in 
oil and spread over wire frames are 
used instead of glass frames covered 
with grease. When filled with the 
perfume, the oil is squeezed out in a 
press. To get the perfumes from 
the grease and oil the latter are put 
into alcohol, when all the odor goes 
into the spirit, leaving the grease 
without scent again. 

The principal perfumes made in 
this way are the essence of rose, 
tuberose, orange, jasmine, violet, 
acacia, and jonquil ; and from these, 
mixed in various ways, are made all 
the other flower perfumes : thus jas¬ 
mine and orange flower mixed make 
sweet pea, and jasmine and tube¬ 
rose, hyacinth. Most of these per¬ 
fumes are made in the south of 
France, especially in the valley of 
the Var, where many acres of flow¬ 
ers are raised for this purpose. 

The word perfume is in French 
fiarfum , and is from the Latin per, 
thoroughly, and fumus , a fume or 
scent. 

PERSIMMON, the Indian name 
of a small plum-like fruit which 
grows wild in the southern United 
States, and as far north as New 
York. The tree belongs to the same 
family as those from which EBONY 
is obtained. The fruit is yellow and 
pulpy, and is sour and puckery until 
it has been touched by the frost, 


when it is very good to eat. A kind 
of liquor is made from persimmons 
in the South. 

PETROLEUM, or rock-oil, is 
found in many parts of the world. 
In some places it rises to the surface 
of the ground, but it is generally got 
by sinking deep holes called wells 
into the earth. In some of these 
wells the oil rises up and flows over 
the top, being forced out by a kind 
of gas which is commonly found 
with it ; but in others the oil has to 
be pumped out. As it comes from 
the earth it is a thick oily liquid of a 
yellowish, brownish, or greenish 
color. It is not known exactly how 
petroleum is made in the earth. At 
first it was thought that it came 
mostly from bituminous COAL, but, 
though some of it is made from this 
coal, it is now known that most 
petroleum comes from much older 
ROCKS than those in which coal is 
found. Some have thought, too, that 
petroleum is made up wholly of 
vegetable matter, but most writers 
think that it has come from both 
vegetables and animals. It is found 
in rocks of all ages, but chiefly in 
shales and sandstones ; and it is now 
mostly believed that it has been 
made chiefly by the decay of sea 
plants and animals. 

Petroleum has been known since 
the most ancient times. It was used 
in Greece and in Italy to burn in 
lamps, and also as a medicine. 
Herodotus, the Greek historian, 
tells of a spring in the island of 
Zante which is still known, and 
which therefore has been flowing 
more than two thousand years. 
This kind of oil has been used also 
in India for an unknown time. 

The chief places where petroleum 
is found are the north part of Italy ; 
near Baku, in Persia, on the shores 
of the Caspian Sea ; at Rangoon, 
Burmah ; in the Caucasus Moun¬ 
tains ; in Galicia, Austria ; and in 
Canada and the United States. In 
the United States the principal 
places are in western Pennsylvania, 





PETROLEUM 


456 


PEWTER 


West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and 
Tennessee ; but some is also found 
in New York, Illinois, Michigan, In¬ 
diana, and California. In the oil re¬ 
gion in Pennsylvania there are now 
several thousand wells, some of 
which are more than a thousand feet 
deep. From some of these wells the 
oil spouts up sometimes faster than it 
can be taken care of. At one time 
one well threw up nearly four thou¬ 
sand barrels of oil in a day and night. 

Oil wells are drilled by drilling- 
tools much like those used in making 
artesian WELLS. The drills used, 
which are very heavy, are hung by 
a great rope which goes over a 
wheel at the top of a high open 
tower of wood called a derrick, and 
are worked up and down by means 
of a small steam engine. In this 
way the hardest rocks can be bored 
through. The well is lined with 
wrought iron tubes, screwed to¬ 
gether in parts, one on top of 
another, and on the outside of the 
tube are put rings of leather with 
the edges cut and turned up so as to 
make a kind of cup around the tube. 
This keeps water from running down 
into the well. 

There is always a good deal of 
marsh-gas with petroleum. This 
gas is made up of CARBON and 
HYDROGEN, and bums very brightly. 
Some of the wells dug give nothing 
but gas, and in such cases the gas 
is often used for fires and lights. 
An iron rolling mill, near Pittsburg, 
burns nothing but gas of this kind, 
which is brought in pipes nearly 
nineteen miles. When not used, the 
gas is lighted, and blazes up as high 
as a four-story house, making a 
fine spectacle at night. The towns 
of Fredonia, in New York, and 
Titusville, in Pennsylvania, are also 
supplied with lights and fuel from 
natural gas. It is this gas which 
forces up the oil through the pipes, 
and when the gas is used up the 
wells have to be pumped ; but some¬ 
times the oil is driven up by the pres¬ 
sure of water. 


The oil from the wells flows into 
great tanks, from which it is carried 
in iron pipes to the shipping places 
and places where it is to be refined 
or purified. There are more than 
two thousand miles of these pipes 
laid in the Pennsylvania oil region, 
and they reach from there all the 
way to Philadelphia. The oil as 
it comes from the earth is thick and 
dirty, and has so bad a smell that it 
would be impossible to use it. It is 
therefore sent to refineries, where it 
is distilled (see Alcohol) and sep¬ 
arated into the different things of 
which it is made up. The principal 
of these are: Oil for burning in 
lamps, commonly called kerosene 
oil ; naphtha, used in making oil¬ 
cloths, in cleaning clothes, kid 
gloves, etc., and sometimes as a 
burning fluid, although it is very 
dangerous ; benzine, used in making 
paints and varnishes ; gasolene, used 
for making gas and for mixing with 
coal gas ; lubricating oil, or oil for 
greasing machinery ; and paraffine, 
used in making candles, matches, 
waterproof cloths, and as a chewing 
gum. Many trials have been made 
to burn petroleum as a fuel for 
furnaces and for steam engines, but 
they have not succeeded very well 
on account of the great smoke which 
it makes. 

The word petroleum means rock 
oil, being made up of the Latin and 
Greek petra, rock, and the Latin 
oleum , oil. 

PEWTER, an ALLOY made up of 
four parts of tin and one part of 
lead, with sometimes a little anti¬ 
mony, copper, and zinc added. In 
old times all kinds of plates and 
dishes were made of pewter, and 
polished pewter-plate was kept on 
sideboards just as silver-plate is in 
these days, but it is only made now 
in small quantities. ' The chief 
things now made out of common 
pewter are ale and beer mugs, 
syringes, beer pumps, common ink- 
stands, and plates for printing 
music. Pewter vessels are some- 





PHONOGRAPH 


457 


PHONOGRAPH 


times cast in iron and brass moulds 
and then finished in a turning lathe ; 
but some are made by hammering 
out the metal, and some by spin¬ 
ning, as told about in Metal 
Work. Britannia metal is a kind 
of pewter made of tin and antimony, 
with a little zinc and copper. It is 
harder than common pewter, and is 
almost as white and handsome as 
silver. It is largely used for mak¬ 
ing coffee-pots and tea-pots, soup 
tureens, vegetable dishes, and other 
table dishes. Another kind called 
Queen’s metal is also made into 
table ware, and used for plating har¬ 
ness, carriages, furniture, etc. 

The word pewter is from the old 
French peutre or peautre, pewter. 


PHEASANT, the name of a family 
of birds of the order rasores, or 
scratchers, including the pheasants 
proper, PEACOCKS, common fowls, 
and TURKEYS. The pheasants 
proper mostly live in Asia, but the 
common pheasant is found in South¬ 
ern Europe, where it is much 
hunted. There are none in the 
United States. 

The word pheasant is from the 
Latin Phasianus , the Phasian bird, 
from Phasis, a river in Asia Minor, 
whence it was first brought. 

PHONOGRAPH. In the article 
Sound it is told that every sound 
makes waves in the air, and that the 
striking of these waves on the drum 
of the ear sets the drum vibrating or 



Phonograph. 


trembling, and this causes the ear to 
hear the sound. In the article 
Telephone is told how sound 
waves will make a thin plate of iron 
vibrate like the drum of the ear, and 
how these vibrations or tremblings 
may be carried hundreds of miles 
over a telegraph wire, so that a per¬ 
son at the other end may hear the 
same sounds which set the iron plate 
trembling. Now, in the phono¬ 
graph there is just such a plate as 
there is in the telephone, and it is set 
trembling by sounds in the same 
way ; but instead of the wire to 
carry the sounds to a distance, as in 
the telephone, the phonograph has a 
little instrument which writes down 
all the vibrations of the plate and 


preserves them so that they may be 
made over again at any time ; and 
when they are made over again, we 
can hear the same sounds which first 
cause the vibrations. 

You can understand this better by 
looking at the picture. In this B is 
a mouth-piece, made like the one in 
the telephone. You see it is hol¬ 
lowed out like a funnel, and has a 
small round hole, H, in the middle. 
Under this hole is fastened the thin 
iron plate, so that when any one 
speaks into the mouth - piece, or 
makes any other sound in it, the 
plate is set trembling by the 
sound waves. In the second picture 
is given a larger view of the mouth¬ 
piece, showing its under side. In 















PHONOGRAPH 


458 


PHONOGRAPH 


this A is the rim of the mouth¬ 
piece, and B is the. thin plate, fitted 
into the rim under the little hole. 
On the under side of the post, P, 
which holds up the mouth-piece, is 
screwed a small piece marked D (the 
edge of it can just be seen in the 
first picture), and on the end of this 
piece is a small steel spring with a 
point, C, at the end of it. This 
spring does not touch the plate B, 
but rests against a little piece of 
India-rubber tube, which lies close 
against the plate, so that whenever 
the plate trembles the steel point is 
made to tremble in just the same 
way. 



Mouth-piece of Phonograph. 


We will now go back to the first 
picture, which shows the whole pho¬ 
nograph. Besides the mouth-piece 
it has a roller or barrel, A, which is 
made to turn round by means of the 
handle of the axle C C. This axle is 
cut round and round like a screw, as 
is shown in the right-hand side, so 
that when the handle is turned one 
way it is screwed up and the barrel 
moved toward the left, and when 
turned the other way it is unscrewed 
and the barrel moved toward the 
right. A spiral or screw line is also 
cut all round the barrel, as is shown 
at the two ends, the middle part 
being covered up in the picture. At 


the left end of the axle is a heavy iron 
wheel, D, which is put on to make 
the axle turn steadily. The mouth¬ 
piece may be moved out from the 
barrel, or put up close to it as in the 
picture, by means of the handle F, 
the whole turning on the pin S. 

Before using the phonograph a 
piece of tin foil, E, is put rourid 
the barrel and fastened at the two 
ends with paste, or by putting them 
into a slit cut in the barrel. If now the 
mouth-piece be moved up close to the 
barrel so that the steel point on the 
under side of the plate shall press 
against the tin foil, and the handle 
be then turned round, the point will 
press the foil into the spiral round 
the barrel, and as the barrel moves 
along sideways a dent will be made 
round and round the foil until it is 
covered all over with a mark like the 
spiral on the barrel. But if anybody 
talks or makes any other sound in 
the mouth-piece while the barrel is 
being turned round, the plate will be 
set trembling and the steel point 
will thus be made to tremble also, 
and instead of making a long, smooth 
dent around the foil, it will make a 
broken line of little hills and valleys, 
just like the tremblings made in the 
plate by the sound waves. These 
dents, which look to the eye like 
rows of dots, are the record or 
marks of the sounds made in the 
mouth-piece ; and if we could read 
them, they would be to us like a 
book in which is written down every 
word which we speak. Unfortu¬ 
nately, they all look alike to our 
eyes, and we cannot understand 
them. 

But there is one way in which we 
can find out what they mean. Move 
back the mouth-piece by pulling out 
the handle F, turn backward the 
handle until the left end of the bar¬ 
rel is again in front of the mouth¬ 
piece, and then move up the mouth¬ 
piece until the steel point fits into 
the dent at its beginning. If now 
the barrel be turned round so 
that the steel point shall pass over 










PHONOGRAPH 


459 


PHOSPHORUS 


the whole row of dents again, it ! 
will move up and down the little 
hills and valleys just as it did the 
first time ; and as the tremblings of 
the plate first caused the steel point 
to make the hills and valleys, so the 
steel point in passing over them 
again will set the plate trembling 
again in the same way. But, you 
will remember, the first tremblings 
of the plate were caused by sounds 
which made sound waves in the 
mouth-piece ; so, when the plate is 
made to tremble in just the same way 
by the steel point under it, the 
tremblings cause like sound waves 
in the air, and when the sound 
waves reach our ears we hear exactly 
the same sounds which first made 
them. 

To understand this fully, let us go 
over it once more. Suppose that 
you read a page of this book to the 
phonograph. Hold your mouth 
close down to the mouth-piece, and 
read in a loud, clear tone, at the 
same time turning the handle round 
so as to move the barrel along. The 
sounds of your voice make sound 
waves which cause the plate to trem¬ 
ble, and the tremblings of the plate 
cause the steel point to write down 
all the sounds on the tin foil. Next, 
move the barrel back and make the 
steel point travel over the same path 
again. The moving of the point 
over the tin foil causes the plate to 
tremble again, the tremblings make 
the same sound waves, and the 
sound waves carry the sounds again 
to your ears, so that the phonograph 
talks back to you the page which you 
read to it. By turning back the bar¬ 
rel and making the point thus travel 
over the same path, the phonograph 
will repeat the same page a great 
many times. 

It makes no difference what 
sounds are made into the mouth¬ 
piece : you may sing, whistle, crow, 
bray, groan, bark like a dog, or mew 
like a cat, the phonograph will re¬ 
peat them all. As it does not speak 
very loud, it is usual, when making it 


I repeat sounds, to put the small end 
of a large funnel over the hole in the 
mouth-piece. This keeps the sound 
waves together, and if we hold our 
ear near the mouth of the funnel, we 
can hear the sounds much more 
clearly than without a funnel. 

The phonograph was first made 
by an American, Mr. Thomas A. 
Edison, of New Jersey. It is not 
yet perfect, but Mr. Edison hopes to 
so improve it that it will repeat ex¬ 
actly the tones of the human voice. 
If this can be done we can preserve 
the speeches of great men and the 
songs of singers forever, and listen 
to them at any time in the same 
tones in which they were spoken and 
sung. 

The word phonograph is made up 
of the Greek words phone , sound, 
and graphein , to write, so that it 
means sound-writer. 

PHOSPHORUS, one of the non- 
metallic elements. When pure it 
is a soft, wax-like, colorless solid. It 
unites so easily with oxygen that it 
has to be always kept under water. 
At the common heat of the air it 
gives off a white smoke, which looks 
bright in the dark, and the heat of 
the hand will make it burst into a 
flame. It will also take fire from 
rubbing, or even from cutting it with 
a knife. Lucifer matches take fire 
when they are rubbed, because the 
substance on the end of the match 
has phosphorus in it. Phosphorus 
is not found free—that is, by itself 
alone—but is always united with 
something else, principally with cal¬ 
cium. It is made chiefly from cal¬ 
cium phosphate, which is got mostly 
from burned bones. Growing 
plants take up the phosphorus from 
the earth, and when animals eat the 
plants it goes into their bones, from 
which it is collected for use. Calci¬ 
um phosphate is also found as a 
mineral in America, chiefly in South 
Carolina and in the Caribbean 
Islands. Phosphorus unites with 
most of the metals and forms phos¬ 
phides. 







PHOTOGRAPH 


460 


PHOTOGRAPH 


The word phosphorus means light- 
bringer, it being made up of the 
Greek phos, light, and pherein , to 
bring. The word phosphorescence, 
meaning the light given out by many 
sea animals and by decaying things, 
is from phosphorus. 

PHOTOGRAPH, a picture made 
on paper by the action of light. 
Various kinds of light-pictures are 
made, all of which have different 
names. The first was the daguer¬ 
reotype (named from Daguerre, a 
Frenchman, who found out how to 
make it), a picture taken on a silver- 
plated copperplate, but it has mostly 
gone out of use. What are called 
ferrotypes (Latin ferrum , iron), or 
tintypes, are pictures taken on thin 
iron plates covered with varnish. 
Similar pictures, called ambrotypes, 
are sometimes made on glass plates ; 
but photographs have now taken 
the place of almost all other light 
pictures. 

The photograph is first made on a 
glass plate, and the picture is then 
printed on prepared paper. The 
glass plate is called a “ negative,” 
because the lights and shades are 
different from what they are in na¬ 
ture—that is, the light parts are dark 
and the dark parts light ; and the 
paper picture printed from the nega¬ 
tive is called a ” positive,” because 
in it the lights and shades are right, 
or as they are in nature. To make 
a negative the glass is first coated 
with a thin film called collodion. 
Collodion is made by dissolving 
gun-cotton in a mixture of alco¬ 
hol, ether, and some other things. 
It is poured quickly over the glass 
plate ; in a short time the alcohol 
and ether pass off in vapor, leaving 
a film or skin on the plate so thin 
that one can see through it. The 
plate is next put for several minutes 
into a bath filled with a mixture of 
water and SILVER nitrate, by which 
a little silver is put over the collodion, 
so as to cover it with a thin film. 
If the plate be then put into the light 
it will soon become dark all over its 


surface, because light will turn silver 
nitrate black ; but if the light be al¬ 
lowed to touch only a part of the 
plate, the other part being covered 
up, only the uncovered part will be¬ 
come dark, and the rest will not be 
changed. Now, in making a nega¬ 
tive the lights and shades are made 
in the same way. The glass plate, 
covered with collodion and the film 
of silver nitrate, is put into a camera, 
a kind of dark box with a lens in 
front. The camera is pointed at the 
object to be photographed, its cover 
is taken off so as to let the light in, 
and an exact image of the object is 
thrown by the lens upon the plate 
inside of the box. In a few seconds 
the camera is closed and the plate 
is taken out. No picture can now 
be seen on it, but by pouring over it 
an acid mixture the picture comes 
out little by little. This is called 
developing the picture. As soon as 
the shaded parts appear, the plate is 
washed, dried, and varnished on the 
collodion side to keep it from getting 
rubbed. It is then ready to use for 
printing positives or paper pictures. 

Photograph paper is covered with 
a thin film of ALBUMEN, made from 
the white of eggs. It is bought 
already prepared by the photog¬ 
rapher, who cuts it up into the 
sizes wanted. Before using the 
paper he coats it with a film of silver 
chloride. It must now be kept in 
the dark, for the light will turn it 
black in the same way as it will the 
plate. To print a picture, a piece of 
the paper is put under a negative, fas¬ 
tened tight to it with clamps, and put 
into the light. Now it will be re¬ 
membered that in the negative the 
light parts are where the shades 
ought to be. The light therefore, in 
passing through the glass upon the 
paper, shines more strongly through 
the light parts than the dark parts, 
so that the places on the paper which 
are under the light parts of the nega¬ 
tive are turned black, while those 
under the dark parts of the negative 
are so shaded that the light does not 







PIANOFORTE 


PIANOFORTE 


461 


change them much. When the pic¬ 
ture is printed enough the paper is 
taken out from under the negative 
and put into a mixture of water and 
soda, which takes out all the silver 
which the light has not darkened, so 
that light will not change it any 
more. The picture is now of a 
brownish shade, and has next to be 
toned or colored. This is done by 
putting it in a mixture of water, 
soda, and a little gold chloride. A 
part of the gold sticks to the picture 
and gives it a purple-black color. 
The picture is then carefully washed 
in water and dried, and afterward 
pasted on cardboard and finished in 
different ways. 

Photographic pictures may be of 
the same size, larger, or smaller than 
that from which they are taken. 
During the siege of Paris by the Ger¬ 
mans large newspapers were photo¬ 
graphed on very small pieces of 
paper and sent by carrier pigeons 
into the city, where they were pho¬ 
tographed large again, so as to be 
easily read. 

The word photograph means light- 
picture, it being made up of the 
Greek words phos , light, and gra- 
phein , to write or paint. 

PIANOFORTE, the full name of 
the musical instrument commonly 
called piano. The piano grew out 
of the harp, and if you look at the 
strings of a piano you will see that 
they are still arranged in the form of 
a harp. The first real piano was 
made about a hundred and fifty years 
ago ; but long before that, instru¬ 
ments something like the piano were 
in use. Queen Elizabeth and the 
ladies of her time played on an in¬ 
strument called the virginal. After 
this came the spinet, and after the 
spinet the harpsichord, out of which 
the piano was finally made. 

The piano is now made in three 
principal forms—the grand, the 
square, and the upright. In grand 
and square pianos the strings are 
horizontal, or on a level, but in up¬ 
rights they run up and down. There 


are three sizes of grand pianos : a 
large size called “ concert grands,” 
fitted for playing in concerts ; a mid¬ 
dle size called ” semi-grands,” for 
large rooms; and a smaller size 
called “ parlor grands,” for playing 
in parlors. Square pianos, which 
are not square but oblong, are usually 
made in two sizes, those of the larger 
size being called ” grand squares.” 

The piano is made up of four 
parts: 1. The frame. 2. The 

strings. 3. The keys and action. 
4. The case. 

1. The Frame is the heavy iron 
part on which the strings are 
stretched. The strings have to be 
stretched so tight that there is a 
great strain on the frame (about 25,- 
000 pounds in a grand piano), and 
unless it is made very strong the 
piano will not keep in tune. In for¬ 
mer times, when pianos were small, 
the frame was made of strong tim¬ 
ber, but it is now made of one piece 
of cast iron, for wood could not stand 
the strain in the large pianos of the 
present day. 

2. The Strings. In the firsi 
pianos strings of steel wire were 
used for the upper notes and brass 
wire for the lower ones, but in mod¬ 
ern pianos the strings are all of steel 
wire. The different tones are made 
by having the wires of different sizes 
and lengths. The longer and larger 
a wire is the lower its tone will be ; 
but as a piano is too short to put in 
wires of the common size which will 
be long enough to make the lowest 
base notes, the wires have to be 
made larger by winding fine wire 
around them. This fine wire is some¬ 
times of soft iron and sometimes of 
copper. In the old spinet there was 
but one string for each note ; in the 
harpsichord there were two, but in 
all large pianos there are three. 
The tone of the strings is much im¬ 
proved by the sounding board, a large 
thin board without any knots in it, 
made usually of American spruce 
wood, which is put under the whole 
row of strings. It is fastened to the 





PIANOFORTE 


462 


PICKLES 


frame by its edges only, so as to 
leave the whole middle part of it 
free to vibrate or tremble when the 
strings sound above it. 

3. Keys and Action. The row of 
keys in a piano is called the key¬ 
board. In the square piano the key¬ 
board is on the side, but in the grand 
piano on the end. The white keys 
are usually made of cherry wood, 
covered with a thin slip of ivory, but 
sometimes with mother-of-pearl. 
The black keys are sometimes made 
of ebony, but commonly of cherry 
wood stained black. All the moving 
part between the keys and the strings 
is called the “ action.” When a piano 
key is pressed down, by the finger, a 
little piece of wood with a head cov¬ 
ered with thick felt is made to jump up 
and strike the strings. This, which 
is called from its shape the hammer, 
is what causes the sound. If the 
key be held down the sound will 
continue, and be clear and open, but 
if the finger be taken off so as to let 
the key rise up, the sound will be 
softened and muffled so that it will 
nearly cease. This is because a 
small piece of leather, called the 
damper, which sits on the top of 
each string, is raised off the string 
when the key is pressed down ; and 
as soon as the finger is taken off the 
key, the damper falls into its place 
again and damps the sound by stop¬ 
ping the vibration or trembling of 
the string. When the loud pedal of 
a piano is pressed down by the foot, 
the whole row of dampers is raised 
up from the strings, so that the 
sounds of all are made loud, clear, 
and ringing. The soft pedal damps 
all the strings, so as to soften the 
sound. Thert are many different 
kinds of actions, some of which are 
simple, while others are very hard 
to understand. 

4. The Case of the piano includes 
the box, which holds the frame, 
strings, and other parts, and the 
legs on which it stands. All this is 
cabinet work, and is made of differ¬ 
ent kinds of wood, which must be 


well dried and seasoned before using. 
The best pianoforte makers have 
large lumber sheds, in which the 
wood for cases is kept stored up 
for several years. Some cases are 
made of solid walnut, mahogany, or 
other woods, but most of them are 
made of some common wood and 
covered with veneers. 

It takes at least six months to make 
a good piano, as the parts have to 
be put together very carefully. The 
different parts are made by different 
workmen, as many as forty persons 
being employed on a grand piano. 

The word pianoforte is from the 
Italian piano, soft, and forte , loud, 
and the instrument is so called be¬ 
cause it can be played either soft or 
loud. 

PICKEREL. See Pike. 

PICKLES, vegetables, fruits, and 
other things preserved in vinegar for 
eating. The vegetables most com¬ 
monly used for pickling are small 
cucumbers, onions, cabbage, cauli¬ 
flower, string beans, and beets ; the 
fruits most used are olives, peaches, 
cherries, mangoes, and several kinds 
of melons and unripe nuts. The 
things to be pickled are first soaked 
for a few days in strong brine made 
of salt and water, then packed into 
the vessels prepared for them ; a 
few peppercorns or other spices are 
put in with them, and boiling 
vinegar is poured in until the vessel 
is quite full, when it is tightly cov¬ 
ered. Makers of pickles often boil 
their vinegar in copper or brass ket¬ 
tles, which gives the pickles a rich 
green color, but this should never be 
done, as the vinegar thus forms an 
acetate of copper, which is very 
poisonous. Therefore pickles of a 
brighter green than the vegetables 
themselves should never be eaten. 

Of foreign pickles the most impor¬ 
tant are olives, which come pickled 
both in brine and in vinegar, ca¬ 
pers,mangoes, and bamboo shoots. 
Chow-chow (Chinese, meaning 
mixed) is a mixture of various kinds 
of pickles. 








PIGEON 


463 


PIGEON 


Several kinds of fish, shell-fish, 
and meat are also preserved in 
brine, but they are not generally 
called pickles. 

The word pickle is in German 
fidkel , and it is said by some to have 
been so called after William Pokel, 
who found out how to pickle herrings 
in the fourteenth century. 

PIGEON. Pigeons are found in 
almost all parts of the world, but 
mostly in warm countries. They 
generally roost and build their nests 
in trees. Their wings are strong, so 
that they can fly great distances, and 
they often go in immense flocks. 
They lay usually but two eggs at a 
time, and wild ones breed but once 
a year, but tame ones will lay and 
hatch seven or eight times in a year. 
Pigeons live together in pairs, and 
both parents sit by turns. Their 
young are fed, until they are able to 
fly, with a milky fluid which both 
males and females raise from the 
crop. Pigeons do not drink like 
other birds, but take a long draught 
without raising the head. 

There are many kinds of pigeons, 
but only two kinds, the common pig¬ 
eon and the turtle-dove, have been 
tamed. All the fancy breeds now 
raised came from the common pig¬ 
eon, which is descended from the 
wild rock pigeon or rock dove. The 
rock pigeon is found along the 
coasts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, 
where it breeds in holes in the rocks 
or in caves opening on the sea, but 
never lives in woods nor builds its 
nests in trees, like most other pig¬ 
eons. The common pigeon, too, likes 
best to make its nest in a dovecot or 
in the loft of a building, where it 
can hide away in the dark. 

Common pigeons are generally 
white, slate-color, light-brown, or a 
mixture of these colors. They are 
easily raised, need but little care, 
and increase very fast. They are 
sometimes fed, and may be taught 
to come to their meals at the sound 
of a whistle, but they commonly fly 
round the neighborhood and pick up 


their food where they please. They 
seldom go a great way from their 
home, but sometimes will leave and 
go to the woods, where they be¬ 
come wild again. Fancy pigeons do 
not do this, but will usually join 
some other flock of tame ones if they 
get lost or are moved from their 
home. Among the principal fancy 
pigeons are those called fantails, 
tumblers, pouters, runts, jacobins, 
nuns, and carrier pigeons. 

Fantail Pigeons are so-called be¬ 
cause they have a way of spreading 
their tails out like a fan, in much 
the same way as the peacock, bend¬ 
ing it so far over the back that the 
feathers often touch the head. Their 
tails sometimes have a trembling 
motion, from which they get the 
second name of shakers. There are 
two kinds of fantails, the broad-tailed 
and the narrow-tailed. Their feath¬ 
ers are generally white, but in some 
they are reddish-brown, slate-color, 
or cream-color. These are very 
pretty birds, but are of little value 
except as curiosities. 

Tumbler Pigeons get their name 
from their habit of turning over or 
tumbling in the air. When starting 
to fly upward they generally turn 
five or six somersaults, and when 
high up in the air, where they will 
stay for several hours at a time, they 
may often be seen in flocks tumbling 
and playing in a very amusing way. 
There are several kinds of tumblers, 
but the “ bald-pated tumbler,” 
named from its snow-white head 
which looks bald, is the best. 

Pouters are so called from the form 
of their crop, which the bird can fill 
with air until it swells up almost as 
large as the body, hiding the head 
and neck. They have then a comical 
appearance, looking much like a 
large round ball, with long feathered 
legs and a slim tail below it. These 
birds are very hard to raise, and 
are not worth much excepting as 
curiosities. They are of different 
colors, black, slate-color, light- 
brown, and yellow, pied with white. 




PIGEON 


464 


PIGEON 


Runts are short, full-breasted 
birds, with a long thick neck, and 
with the tail slightly turned up. 
The feathers are generally grizzled— 
that is, black and white mixed, but 
some have black, white, or reddish- 
brown feathers. In the Friesland 
runt the feathers stick out the wrong 
way, giving it an odd look. 

Jacobins have a ruff of raised feath¬ 
ers on the back part of the head, 
forming a kind of hood or cowl like 
that of a monk. The name is from 
Jacobus, the Latin for James, and 
was given to the Dominican monks 
of Saint James in Paris. Jacobin 
pigeons are small, but pretty in 
form. Some are pure white, but 
generally the back, breast, and 
hood are reddish-brown, and the 
head, wings, and tail white. This 
pigeon stays much at home, its hood 
keeping it from flying very far. 

Nuns have their heads almost cov¬ 
ered with a veil of feathers, from 
which they get their name. The body 
is mostly white, and the head, tail, 
and part of the wings generally red¬ 
dish, yellow, or black. This pigeon 
is small, but is very neat and pretty. 

The Trumpeter is named from the 
sound it makes, which is thought to 
be some like the tone of a trumpet. 
It has feathered legs, a ruff on its 
neck, and a tuft of feathers sprout¬ 
ing from the base or upper part of 
the bill. The larger this tuft is, the 
more the bird is prized. 

The Carrier Pigeon is larger than 
the common pigeon, and is longer 
and slimmer in the body. Its neck 
is long and slim, and it has a piece 
of naked skin across its bill and 
hanging down on each side. The 
best ones have also a wide circle 
round the eyes, bare of feathers. 
The wings are strong, and these birds 
will fly very fast for great distances. 
They are noted for their love of 
home, and they will always find their 
way back even when taken hundreds 
of miles away. For this reason they 
have been used from the most an¬ 
cient times, especially in the East, 


for carrying letters, and it is from 
this that they get their name. Sail¬ 
ors used to carry pigeons on their 
voyages and set them free when they 
reached the port they were going 
to, in order that they might carry 
home the news of their safe arrival. 
The Romans used them to carry 
news in and out of besieged towns. 
The Prince of Orange used them in 
the same way in the siege of Ley¬ 
den (1574) ; they were also used dur¬ 
ing the siege of Paris by the Ger¬ 
mans (1870-71), thousands of letters 
and even newspapers, photographed 
on small thin films, or skins of col¬ 
lodion (see Gun-Cotton), being 
sent in and out of the city. 

The training of carrier pigeons be¬ 
gins as soon as they are strong 
enough to fly. The young birds are 
taken in a covered basket to a place 
about a half mile from their home 
and set free. Those which do not 
go home are considered worthless ; 
those which do go home at once are 
tried again, the distance being in¬ 
creased each time, until it is found 
that they will go back no matter how 
far away they are carried. The let¬ 
ter is usually written on very thin 
paper and tied around the upper 
part of the leg. Carrier pigeons will 
fly at least thirty miles an hour, and 
some have been known to go twice 
and even three times as fast. 

The Wild Pigeon of the United 
States is the passenger pigeon. 
These birds are found in the West¬ 
ern and South-western States in 
great numbers. Their roosting and 
breeding places often cover many 
square miles of forest, every tree 
being filled with nests wherever a 
place can be found for them. Some¬ 
times they fly in such vast flocks that 
they hide the sun, and the noise of 
their wings is like the roar of the 
wind. An old farmer, who once 
heard a great flock flying through 
the woods, said they made more 
noise than ten thousand threshing 
machines. 

Audubon says that these pigeons 






PIKE 


465 


PIN 


travel a mile a minute, and their 
eyes are so sharp that as they fly 
over the country they can tell at a 
glance whether it is barren or has 
in it the kind of food they want. 
They do not go from one part of the 
country to another to find a warmer 
climate, but only in search of 
BEECH nuts and ACORNS, which are 
their principal food. They often fly 
hundreds of miles in a day to feed, 
going back to their roosts at night. 
Sometimes they light on the trees in 
such numbers that the branches are 
broken down and many pigeons 
crushed. Great numbers are killed 
every season for market, their flesh, 
which is brown, being much liked 
for food. Many young pigeons, or 
squabs, as they are called, are taken 
alive. When they are nearly old 
enough to fly, men go to their roosts 
armed wth long poles, with which 
they upset their nests ; the poor 
squabs tumble out and are caught in 
great numbers. They can then be 
put into cages, fattened, and killed 
as they are wanted. 

The pigeon belongs to the order 
rasores, or scratching BIRDS. 

The word pigeon is in French pig¬ 
eon , which is from the old French 
pipion, from the Latin pipire, to 
peep. 

PIKE, the common name of a 
family of fresh water fishes belong¬ 
ing mostly in North America. The 
pickerel (pike-erel, or small pike) is 
found in most lakes in the northern 
United States. There are two 
kinds, the shovel-nosed and the 
short-nosed or trout pickerel. They 
are strong fish, rapid swimmers, 
and very greedy, living mostly on 
other fish. A large pike or pickerel 
will run down a smaller fish just as 
a greyhound runs down a hare. No 
matter how the frightened little fish 
may turn and bend, now swimming 
among the weeds in hope of finding 
a hiding-place, now darting through 
a shoal of other .fish in hope of being 
lost sight of, its big and savage foe 
is not to be deceived. The pike 


follows it surely and steadily, until 
at last, tired out, it falls into his gap¬ 
ing jaws, and he then swims away 
to his lair to eat his prey at his ease. 

The pike of the great lakes is 
larger than the pickerel, being often 
three feet long. A still larger kind 
is the muscalonge of Lake Cham¬ 
plain, which sometimes weighs as 
much as a small boy (thirty to forty- 
pounds). 

The pike is so called from its 
sharp nose, which is like a pike or 
spear. 

PILE, a pointed log of wood, 
which is driven into the earth to 
make a foundation to build upon, a 
dam in water, etc. Piles are gen¬ 
erally used in loose soil, through 
which they are driven till they reach 
a hard bottom. They thus make a 
safe and firm foundation for build¬ 
ings, roads, wharves, and bridges. 
Coffer DAMS are sometimes built by 
driving rows of piles in circles and 
packing clay between them. Piles 
are driven into the ground by ma¬ 
chines called pile-drivers, worked 
usually by steam. A heavy weight 
is raised up between two tall posts 
and let fall from the top on to the 
pile, which it thus drives in by blow 
after blow. 

Some piles are made of iron and 
cast hollow ; and some have screws 
at the bottom, instead of points, by 
means of which they are screwed 
into the ground. 

The word pile is from the Anglo- 
Saxon pil y which is from the Latin 
pila, a pillar. 

PIN. Pins were formerly made 
by hand, and the heads were put on 
separately and welded on while hot 
by blows of a hammer; but they 
are now made mostly by machines 
which produce them solid-headed. 
Some pins are still made by hand in 
England, but none in the United 
States. The pin machine, which 
is an American invention, makes 
the whole pin without any help from 
the workman, who is thus able to at¬ 
tend to several of them at a time. 






PIN 


466 


PINCERS 


The brass wire, which is of just the 
thickness of the pins to be made, is 
Tolled up on a reel at the back of 
the machine. A pair of nippers 
takes hold of the end of the wire 
and draws in enough to make one 
pin. This is cut off and carried to 
the pointing wheel, where it is 
sharpened. A finer wheel then 
finishes the point, and the pin is 
next carried to the heading die, 
where a steel punch jams down the 
end and partly makes the head. 
Another die and punch finish the 
head, and the completed pin drops 
into a box. The machine goes on 
thus making pin after pin, at the 
rate of three or four every second 
of time, until all the wire on the 
reel is used up, when another reel 
of wire is put in its place. 

The pins, which are of the color 
of brass when they come from the 
machine, are brightened in a barrel 
of saw dust which is made to turn 
round very fast. They are next 
boiled for about three hours in cop¬ 
per kettles in weak nitric acid in 
which are pieces of tin. This covers 
them with a thin coating of tin, and 
they are then rolled again in a bar¬ 
rel of saw dust to polish them. 
Lastly, they are stuck on papers by 
another machine, which puts one 
row on at a time. All this machine 
needs is a supply of paper and pins, 
and it will do all the work without 
any help. Black pins are made by 
boiling brass pins in japan varnish 
instead of with tin. 

Pins like those now used were not 
known in ancient times. Even in 
England, up to about the middle of 
the sixteenth century, people fast¬ 
ened their dresses with thorns, and 
with bone, ivory, and wooden skew¬ 
ers ; but the rich sometimes had 
gold and silver ones. Pins were first 
brought into England from France 
by Catherine Howard, fifth Queen 
of Henry VIII. They were so ex¬ 
pensive that for a long time they 
were used by rich ladies only, and it 
became customary to give a certain 


sum to women at their marriage for 
buying pins, which sum was thence 
called “ pin-money.” 

The word pin is found in many 
languages, and is perhaps from the 
Latin pinna , a pinnacle or small 
steeple. 

PINCERS or PINCHERS are 

small instruments made for seizing 



Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Fig. 3. 

Blacksmith’s Shoemaker's 

Pincerc. Pincers. Uppers. 

things to be held fast, for drawing 
out nails, and for other uses. Black¬ 
smiths have several kinds for holding 



Fig. 4- Fig. 5. 

Pliers. Punch Pliers. 


pieces of iron while heating them in 
the fire and when hammering them 
on the anvil. Carpenters, shoe¬ 
makers, and other mechanics also 
have different kinds. In the pictures 
Fig. 1 is a kind used by blacksmiths 
and farriers, and Fig. 2 by shoe¬ 
makers. In Fig. 3 is shown a kind 









PINE 


467 


PINEAPPLE 


of pincers commonly called nippers, 
used by carpenters and others for 
cutting wire, nipping off small nails, 
or for holding things. Pliers, Fig. 4, 
are small pincers by which any 
small thing, such as wires and thin 
ieces of metal, may be seized and 
ent. Another form, Fig. 5, called 
punch-pliers, has a hollow sharp- 
edged steel punch on one of the 
jaws, so that when it is pressed 
down on the other jaw it will punch 
a hole in leather, paper, etc. Punch- 
pliers are used by shoemakers to 
make holes in shoes for the shoe¬ 
strings, by harness-makers for cut¬ 
ting holes in straps for buckles, and 
by railroad conductors for punching 
tickets. 

The word pincers is from the 
French pincer, to pinch. 

PINE, the name of a family of 
cone-bearing trees found in Europe, 
Asia, and America. Pines are 
marked by their leaves, which are 
needle-shaped, and which grow in 
clusters of two to five, with little 
scales at their base. Most of the 
pines are found in cool countries, 
some even in the Arctic regions. 
The principal pines in the United 
States are the white and the yellow 
pine. 

The White Pine, which grows in 
Canada, the Northern and Middle 
United States, and as far south as 
Georgia, is one of the largest of for¬ 
est trees, being often more than 
twice as high as a four-story house 
(130 to 150 feet) ; and some have 
been cut which were much more 
than two hundred feet high. From 
this tree, which is soft and easily 
worked, comes most of the lumber 
or wood used for the woodwork on 
the inside of houses, and it is also 
used for the frames of buildings, for 
the timbers of bridges, the masts 
and spars of ships, and many other 
purposes. 

The Yellow Pine grows mostly 
along the Atlantic coast from North 
Carolina southward. It is very 
abundant in Georgia, and is often 


called Georgia pine. It seldom 
grows more than seventy-five feet 
high. Yellow pine timber is harder 
and tougher than white pine, and is 
much used in ship building, for mak¬ 
ing floors, and many other things. 
From this tree is made the greater 
part of the turpentine, resin, tar, and 
pitch used in the United States. 

The Sugar Pine of the Rocky 
Mountains grows sometimes three 
hundred feet high, or higher than a 
church steeple. Its wood is much 
like that of the white pine. The 
resin which oozes out of it when 
partly burned is sweet, and is used 
by the Indians for sugar. The seeds 
of the tree are also eaten by them, 
either roasted or pounded and made 
into cakes. 

The word pine is from the Latin 
pinus, pine. 

PINEAPPLE, the FRUIT of the 
pineapple plant, which first grew in 
South America, but which is now 
found in most hot countries. The 
pineapple plant has many long, stiff, 
sharp-pointed leaves, from the mid¬ 
dle of which grows a short stem 
bearing a single fruit. Pineapples are 
sent from the West Indies to all 
parts of the world, and are much 
valued as a fruit for dessert and for 
preserving. The juice is used for 
flavoring ices, soda-water, and other 
things, and in some countries a liq¬ 
uor called pineapple rum is made 
out of it. The leaves of the plant 
have in them fine fibres or threads 
from which are made the beautiful 
goods called pineapple cloth. This 
is largely manufactured in the Phil¬ 
ippine Islands. Cordage and nets 
are also made from this fibre. 

The juice of the wild pineapple is 
said to be so sour and sharp that it 
will take the skin off the lips and 
gums, and it is only when cultivated 
that the fruit is good to eat. Great 
numbers of fine pineapples are 
raised in England in glass hot¬ 
houses, and the fruit thus grown is 
said to be better than that brought 
from hot countries. 





PIPE 


468 


PIPE 


The word pineapple is made up 
of pine and apple, and the fruit is 
so called because it looks like a pine 
cone. 

PIPE, a bowl and tube for smok- 


Fig. 1.—Boring the Stem. 

iftg tobacco. Tobacco pipes are 
made of many different things, such 
as baked clay, porcelain, glass, 
stone, meerschaum, wood, and 
various metals. Common clay 
pipes are made of a kind of 
white clay, called pipe-clay, 
found chiefly in Dorsetshire 
and Devonshire, England, but 
also in France, Belgium, and 
Germany, where pipes are 
largely made. The clay is first 
ground and carefully purified. 
Children, who are trained to the 
work, roll out little lumps of it on a 
table into long rolls of the size of 
a pipe stem. A lump of clay large 


ing into the mould the plug (Fig. 4), 
which is shown in place in Fig. 3. 
By pushing the wire a little further, 
until it touches the plug, the hole is 
made entirely through the pipe. 
Ornaments and letters to be made 
on the pipe are cut into the mould, 
and are thus pressed into the clay. 
After the pipe has been dried for 
a time it is baked in a kiln with 
many others. A man can make 
about five hundred such pipes in a 
day. 

The pipes most valued by smokers 




Fig. 2.—Shaping the Bowl. 

enough to make a bowl is then stuck 
on to the end of each roll, and in this 
state they are laid on boards to dry. 
When dry enough the pipe moulder 
takes a long sharp wire, which has 
a wooden handle, and runs it care¬ 
fully through the whole length of 
each stem, as shown in the picture 
(Fig. 1). The roll of clay, with the 
wire in it, is next laid into the half 
of a copper or brass mould (Fig. 2), 
which has another half that can be 
fitted to it exactly by means of pins 
put through the little holes. The 
mould is now placed in an iron frame 
(Fig. 3) and screwed up tightly to¬ 
gether. The bowl is made by forc¬ 


Fig. 3.—Boring the Bowl. 

are those made of 7 neerschaum (sea- 
foam, from German meer, the sea, 
and schaurn , foam), a soft white min¬ 
eral which looks something 
like chalk. Most of the meer¬ 
schaum comes from Asia 
Minor, near the town of 
Konieh, where it is dug from 
the earth. It is sent to other 
countries either in rough 
blocks or in partly-shaped 
pipe bowls, which are after¬ 
ward finished by workmen skilled in 
the business. A large number are 
made in Vienna and Pesth, and some 



in New York and other cities. Some 
are very beautifully carved. The 
parings are ground up, mixed with 
























PISTOL 


469 


PLANE 


water, and moulded into blocks from 
which a cheaper kind of pipe bowls 
called massa-bowls are made. 

The Germans make pipe bowls of 
porcelain, which are finely painted 
and ornamented. The pipes of the 
Turks, Persians, and other Eastern 
nations are sometimes very beauti¬ 
ful and expensive. One kind, called 
a chibouk , has an earthenware bowl, 
a long cherry stem, and an amber 
mouth-piece. Other kinds, called 
hookahs and 7 iargiles or nargilehs , 
are very large, with long flexible 
stems, and are so made that the to¬ 
bacco smoke is drawn through water 
to cool it. 

Pipe stems are made of cane, and 
of cherry, elder, mock-orange, jas¬ 
mine, and other woods. Great num¬ 
bers of cherry stems are made in 
Austria. Mouth-pieces are usually 
made of ivory or amber, but some¬ 
times of gold and silver. A great 
deal of amber is used for making 
mouth-pieces for pipes and cigar- 
holders, and some are very costly. 

The word pipe is Anglo-Saxon. 

PISTOL, a small firearm, to be 
used with one hand Pistols came 
into use soon after muskets. At 
first they were made with but one 
barrel, but another barrel was soon 
added. Revolving pistols were 
made at an early period, but they 
did not come into use. In 1836 
Samuel Colt first made the pistol 
which is named after him, and since 
that time others have made revolving 
pistols, but they are all much like 
his. The Colt pistol is now used by 
the United States navy and by the 
cavalry. It has but one barrel, be¬ 
hind which is a cylinder bored usually 
with six chambers or holes, each of 
the same size round as that of the 
barrel ; but the number of chambers 
may be more or less than six. The 
chambers are loaded with metal car¬ 
tridges, containing the powder, ball, 
and percussion powder, much like 
those used in the Springfield rifle. 
The Remington and the Smith & 
Wesson revolving pistols differ but 


little from Colt’s, and use the same 
kind of cartridge The Smith & 
Wesson pistol is used by the Russian 
army. The pistol used in the British 
army is called the Adams ; it is 
made in England, but. it is much like 
the Colt pistol. Other European 
armies are armed mostly with pis¬ 
tols made in France and Belgium. 

The Colt armory in Hartford, Con¬ 
necticut, is one of the largest in the 
world, and can make more than *a 
thousand firearms in a day. On the 
grounds, which cover about 250 
acres, are, besides the workshops 
and offices, many houses for the 
workmen, a fine church, and other 
buildings. All the ornaments of one 
of the main doors of the church are 
made up of the parts of pistols put 
together in different ways. The 
work is so neatly done and looks so 
well that one would not see the pis¬ 
tols unless they were pointed out. 
This doorway is called the Armor¬ 
ers’ Porch. 

The word pistol is thought by 
some to have been made from Pis- 
toja, Italy, where pistols are said to 
have been first made ; but others 
think it was made from the Latin 
j)istillum, pestle, because the first 
pistols looked much like the pestle 
of a mortar. 

PLANE. This tool, in its most 
simple form, is only a CHISEL set 
at a slant into a kind of box called 
the stock, with the cutting edge com¬ 
ing through the bottom just far 
enough to cut a thin shaving from 
the wood over which it is passed. 
If a man tried to smooth a board 
with a chisel, he would have to hold 
the tool very firmly in his hand and 
keep it at just the same slant all the 
time. This he would find almost 
impossible to do, because any twist 
in the grain of the wood or any knot 
would be apt to turn the edge aside. 
But when the blade is fixed tightly 
in a box, as in the plane, it is 
guided and cannot slip aside. 

Such a plane, however, would be 
hard to use, because the shaving 




PLANE 


470 


PLANTS 


which it cuts is long and presses 
against the plane-iron in coming up 
through the hole in the stock. 
Another iron, called a back-iron, is 
therefore put on top of the chisel 
blade, the object of which is to turn 
up the shaving as fast as it is cut and 
break it, so that it cannot press so 
tightly as it comes through. If you 
look at a shaving from a plane, you 



will see that it is broken across in 
little pieces in its whole length. 

Three kinds of planes are com¬ 
monly used by carpenters and join¬ 
ers, the jack-plane, the trying-plane, 
and the smoothing-plane. The 
jack-plane, the form of which is 
shown in the picture, is generally 
about fifteen inches long. Its use is 
to cut off from the surface of boards 
the rough marks made by the saw. 
Its edge is a little curved, so that it 
does not cut exactly level, but makes 
little valleys all over the surface. 
The trying-plane, generally about 



two feet long, looks much like the 
jack-plane, but has a straight edge, 
and is used after the jack-plane, to 
shave down all the lines between the 
valleys so as to make the surface 
even. The shavings cut by the try¬ 
ing-plane are smoother than those 
which come from the jack-plane. 
The smoothing-plane, the shape of 


which is shown in the picture, is 
much shorter than the others. It is 
used after the trying-plane, to shave 
off any small twists, curls, or other 
rough places which may be left. 

There are many other forms of 
planes used by carpenters and join¬ 
ers, with blades made in different 
shapes for cutting uneven surfaces, 
such as mouldings for doors and win¬ 
dow frames, picture frames, etc. 

The word plane is from the Latin 
planus , level, and the tool is so 
called because it is used to make sur- 
I faces level or even. 

PLANE TREE, the name of the 
j tree commonly called buttonball or 
buttonwood in the United States, 
and sometimes sycamore. It grows 
almost all over the United States 
east of the Rocky Mountains. It is 
frequently more than 100 feet high, 
12 to 15 feet thick, and makes an ex¬ 
cellent shade tree. Its wood is hard 
and close-grained. In the East it is 
used for ship-building and for join¬ 
ers’ work, but it is not much used 
in this country. The buttonballs, 
which are the fruit of the tree, are 
made up of a single seed covered 
with bristly down. 

The plane tree gets its name from 
the Latin platanus, Greek platanos , 
plane tree, from platus , broad, its 
top being broad and spreading. 

PLANTS. Plants make up the 
vegetable kingdom, just as animals 
form the animal kingdom, and rocks 
the mineral kingdom (see Ele¬ 
ment). Plants are found on nearly 
all parts of the surface of the earth, 
both on dry land and in the water, 
but no two countries have exactly 
the same kinds. All the plants 
growing in any country are com¬ 
monly called the flora of such coun¬ 
try. Plants grow best in hot and 
damp countries, and generally grow 
smaller, both in size and in number 
of kinds, as we go from the equator 
toward the poles or cold parts of the 
earth ; and they do not grow on the 
tops of very high mountains, nor at 
' very great depths in seas and lakes. 










PLANTS 


47 i 


PLANTS 


Plants grow in a great number of 
forms. Many of these forms, such 
as trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, 
ferns, mosses, lichens, and sea¬ 
weeds, are well known to us ; but 
there are also many other kinds. 
The green and purple slimes that 
stain damp walls and rocks, and 
stones in water ; the moulds which 
gather on food, books, and cloth ; 
the smut, rust, and blight which 
spoil the stems, leaves, and fruit of 
crops ; and even the dry rot which 
eats up trees, wooden houses, and 
ships, are plants which live, grow, 
increase, and die like the largest 
trees and shrubs. 

Some plants live but a short time, 
while others live for more than a 
thousand years. The most common 
forms may be divided into trees, 
shrubs, and herbs. Trees are woody 
plants with a single stem or trunk 
which rises to a great height. 
Shrubs are also woody plants, but 
they do not grow very high, never 
more than three or four times as 
high as a man, and usually much 
smaller, and when they do grow to 
such a height it is not by a single 
stem, but by several stems growing 
out of the ground. A woody plant 
not so high as a man is commonly 
called a bush, and slender woody 
plants which cannot hold them¬ 
selves up are called vines. Herbs 
are plants with soft and brittle 
stems, which die down to the ground 
in winter, or die root and all each 
year. 

Trees and shrubs are called peren¬ 
nials (Latin per, through, and 
annus , year), because they live on 
through many years. They are 
either evergreen or deciduous. Ever¬ 
green trees and shrubs keep their 
leaves all the year round ; deciduous 
(Latin de, from, and cadere, to fall) 
trees and shrubs lose their leaves 
every winter. 

Herbs are divided into annuals, 
biennials, and perennials. Annuals 
(Latin annus, a year) grow up from 
the seed, blossom, and die in the 


same year. Indian corn, the grains, 
peas, beans, and many flowers are 
annuals. Biennials (Latin bis, 
twice, and annus, year) are herbs 
which live for two years. They do 
not blossom the first year, but live 
through the winter, flower the sec¬ 
ond year, and die when they have 
ripened their seeds. The cabbage, 
turnip, beet, pars¬ 
nip, carrot, radish, 
and some flowers 
are biennials. 

Many herbs are, 
like trees and 
shrubs, peren¬ 
nials, but most of 
them die down to 
the ground before 
winter. Potatoes, 
sweet potatoes, 
dahlias, peonies, plant Cells, 
lilies, and flower- 
de-luces are perennials. 

The substance of which plants are 
made up is called their tissue. 
There are several kinds of tissue, the 
difference between which can be 
seen only with a MICROSCOPE. The 
principal substance of most plants is 
cellular tissue, which is a mass of 
many little bags or 
cells, some round or 
egg-shaped and some 
round and long like a 
barrel, all crowded to¬ 
gether so closely that 
there are as many as 
a hundred in an inch. 

The cells are divided 
from each other by 
partitions so thin that 
fluids can easily go 
through them, and the 
sap of plants is carried 
to the different parts 
chiefly by passing from cell to cell. 
On the outside of plants these cells 
are a good deal flattened, so as 
to form a kind of skin. All the 
fleshy fruits, such as the peach 
and apple, and root vegetables, like 
turnips, carrots, and beets, are 
made up of cellular tissue. In the 




Long 

Plant Cells. 











PLANTS 


472 


PLANTS 


pulp of an orange the cells can be 
seen put loosely together. 

The woody parts of plants are 
made up of wood tissue, which con¬ 
sists of long thread-like 
pipes pointed at each end 
and filled with a matter 
which makes them tough. 
All kinds of wood are 
made up of these thready 
pipes, packed closely to¬ 
gether side by side. In 
some plants they may be 
separated from the bark 
and stems by pounding 
or soaking in water ; and 
in this way hemp and 
flax are got. Thready 
tubes twisted round like 
a corkscrew may also 
be seen in some plants, 
such as asparagus, the 
strawberry, and the gera¬ 
nium. 

All parts of a plant, 
root, stem, leaves, flow¬ 
ers, and fruit, are made 
up of cells of different 
kinds, and by means of 
these the plant lives and 
grows. The cells of the 
root become filled with fluid, and 
this fluid, which in the plant we 
call sap, rises up through the cells 
of the stem, mostly through the 
woody parts when there are any, 
and passes into the cells of the 
leaves, where it is changed by the 
air and the light and made fit for its 
many uses. In trees and shrubs 
this changed sap passes down again 
through the inner bark, and in herbs 
through the soft parts it is thought, 
and all along meets and mixes with 
the sap going up, giving strength to 
the plant and causing it to grow. 
The two kinds of sap do not flow 
separately, but are all the while mix¬ 
ing together in all parts of the plant, 
and passing from one cell to another. 

When plants are growing, the 
younger cells divide and form new 
cells. In some plants, such as mush¬ 
rooms and toadstools, new cells are 


thus formed very fast. The puff¬ 
ball will often grow in one night 
from the size of a marble to that of 
a child’s head, merely by the divid¬ 
ing and growing of the cells in it. 
After cells have become too old 
to divide any more, they grow into 
the shape which they are to keep. 
Wood-cells grow much in length 
after they have stopped dividing, but 
the cells in cork and pith do not 
change much. 

Plants need air, heat above freez¬ 
ing, light, water, and some earthy 
matter to make them live and grow. 
A few kinds are exceptions, such as 
lichens, fungi, and mosses, which 
can stand much cold; fungi, too, 
grow well in the dark. The green 
of plants comes from a substance 
called chlorophyll (Greek chloros , 
green, and fihullon, leaf), in the 
cells near the surface of the leaves 
and stems, which is not green itself, 
but is colored green by the action of 
light. Therefore, the parts of plants 
which grow underground, such as 
roots and bulbs, are not green ; and 
mushrooms, which are usually raised 
underground, and celery, whose 
stalks are covered up with earth as 
they grow, are always white. But 
light does not change the colors of 
flowers. Hyacinths will grow in a 
dark cellar, and put out both leaves 
and flowers ; the leaves will be pale, 
but the flowers will have their right 
colors. 

Plants live on food which is partly 
gaseous and partly liquid. The gas¬ 
eous food is carbonic ACID, which 
they get chiefly from the air, and take 
in principally by their leaves. The 
liquid food is water, which they take 
up mostly through their roots. The 
carbonic acid gas of the AIR goes 
into the cells of the leaves and is there 
acted upon by the sunlight, which 
divides it, the oxygen going back into 
the air and the carbon staying in the 
plant. The water taken up by the 
roots of plants becomes sap and 
passes up the stem and the branches 
until it reaches the cells of the 



Wood 

Tissue. 













PLANTS 


473 


PLANTS 


leaves, where some of its oxygen 
and hydrogen unite with the carbon 
made by the sunlight from the car¬ 
bonic acid, and form starch. But a 
good deal of the water passes off 
into the air as vapor through thou¬ 
sands of little holes in the leaves, 
called pores. This passing off of 
vapor, or evaporation as it is called, 
keeps plants cool in the hottest wea¬ 
ther, and makes the air soft and 
pleasanter for us to breathe. In hot 
weather the air would be very dry 
and burning if plants did not breathe 
out moisture from their pores ; and 
it is on account of the scarcity of 
plants that deserts are so dry and 
barren, and that the air of cities is 
dryer than that of the country. 

In the water which plants take up 
from the earth are mixed salts, 
made up mostly of nitrogen, 
PHOSPHORUS, SULPHUR, POTASH, 
and iron. These substances are 
found in most soils where plants 
grow, and are a necessary part of 
their food. When the same kind 
of crop is raised year after year on 
the same ground, and is cut and car¬ 
ried away, all these substances are 
taken out of the soil, and it becomes 
poor and unfit to raise crops. Ma¬ 
nure is, therefore, put on it to re¬ 
fresh it, because from its decay the 
soil gets back the substances taken 
away by the crops. When plants 
die and decay on the same ground 
where they grow, no manure is 
needed, for the substances which 
they took from the soil are thus 
given back to it. 

The starch made in the leaves 
mixes in the sap with the salts taken 
from the earth by the water, and 
helps to make new wood, bark, 
leaves, flowers, and fruit, and a 
great many other things which make 
the differences between plants : such 
as sugar, found in the cells of sugar 
cane, beet, and all sweet fruits ; 
oils, found in seeds and fruits, such 
as flaxseed and cotton seed, and 
the olive, almond, cocoa-nut, etc. ; 
resins, found in the pine, spruce, fir, 


and other trees ; gums, such as In¬ 
dia-rubber and gutta-percha trees ; 
colorings, such as logwood and 
other dyewoods ; medicines, such as 
quinine and rhubarb ; perfumes, 
and a great number of other sub¬ 
stances. Much of the starch of 
plants is laid up in those parts meant 
for the food of the plant during win¬ 
ter and for its growth in the spring. 
Thus, seeds, bulbs, and roots have 
a great deal of it and use it up as 
they grow. 

Most plants grow from SEEDS. 
Seeds look to us to be without life, 
being generally dry, and often very 
hard and even bony ; but they have 
life in them, and will grow if they 
are put where there is dampness 
and heat. Seeds kept dry will not 
change at all, and some kinds will 
keep life in them for a great many 
years ; but the stories told about 
seeds taken from Egyptian mum¬ 
mies several thousand years old, 
which grew when planted, are not 
trustworthy, although seeds which 
have been buried in the earth for 
many years have been known to 
sprout and come up. 

In the article Seeds is told that 
all seeds may be divided into two 
classes, those with one seed-leaf or 
cotyledon, and those with two seed- 
leaves or cotyledons ; and that plants 
which grow from the first kind of 
seeds are called monocotyledons 
(more fully, monocotyledonous 
plants), and those which grow from 
the second kind, dicotyledons (more 
fully, dicotyledonous plants). Most 
of the plants in cool climates are 
dicotyledons ; thus all of our forest 
and fruit trees and most of our 
shrubs and flowers belong to this 
class, but the palmetto tree, Indian 
corn, and other grain-plants, the 
onion, lilies, and like plants, are 
monocotyledons. Many trees of hot 
climates, such as the palms, are also 
monocotyledons. 

When seeds are planted the damp¬ 
ness in the earth makes them swell. 
The skin of the seed soon breaks, 






PLANTS 


474 


PLANTS 


and a little root pushes out and 
goes downward into the ground, 
and then a stalk comes out and 
shoots upward. We do not know 
what makes the root go down and 
the stalk go up, but they always do 
so, no matter how the seed lies in 
the ground. The coverings of some 
seeds, such as peach stones, wal¬ 
nuts, and other nuts, are very hard, 
but when they soak in the ground 
they swell and crack open, and let 
out the roots and the stalk just as 
beans and corn do. 

Some roots taper or grow down 
to a point, as in the carrot and the 
radish, and are called tap roots ; 
others are like a bunch of threads 
hangingdown, like most grass roots, 
and are called fibrous roots. In 
shrubs and trees the tap foots have 
branches which, like the tap roots, 
grow thick and woody. Both are cov¬ 
ered with fine roots called root hairs, 
and it is these which suck up water 
from the soil. Roots generally go 
down into the soil at once ; but some 
roots come from different parts of 
the stem and grow in the air first. 
In the banyan tree of India roots 
sprout from all parts of the branches 
and run down to the earth, thus 
forming many stem-like roots which 
help to hold up the limbs of this 
wide-spreading tree. There are two 
kinds of roots, those which simply 
feed the plant as it grows, and those 
which lay up food to help the growth 
of the plant the next year. Among 
the first kind are the roots of trees, 
shrubs, and grasses ; among the 
second kind are such roots as those 
of the beet, carrot, turnip, radish, 
and dahlia. 

The use of the stem is to hold up 
the leaves, buds, and flowers, and 
to carry the sap to the different 
parts of the plant. The stem 
usually grows up into the light, but 
not always ; some stems grow un¬ 
derground, and are often mistaken 
for roots. Thus the bulbs of 
onions, leeks, tulips, and lilies are 
really stems, as are also the woody 


underground runners of some kinds 
of grass. These underground run¬ 
ners are called root-stocks, because 
roots spring from them. The po¬ 
tato is only a fleshy root-stock, and 
not really a root. Of the stems 
which grow out of the ground, some 
have short and some tall stems, 
some are with branches and some 
without branches, and some are 
straight and some twined. Of twin¬ 
ing stems, like the hop, ivy, honey¬ 
suckle, and grapevine, some turn to¬ 
ward the right and some toward the 
left, but the same kind of plant al¬ 
ways twines the same way. 

Plants have two principal kinds of 
stems, one belonging to dicotyle¬ 
donous plants and the other to mono- 
cotyledonous plants. The difference 
can easily be seen by comparing the 
branch of a tree with a cornstalk. 
The fourth picture shows in its upper 
part half of a branch of a tree cut 
across, and in its lower part the same 
split downward ; and the fifth pic¬ 
ture shows half of a cornstalk cut 
and split in the same way. The tree 
has a bark on the outside which easily 



CL 

Exogen, Top and Side View. 


comes off from the wood, and the 
inner part is solid wood ; but the 
cornstalk has only a thin skin, which 
will not peel off clean like bark, and 
the inner part is not hard, but soft 
and stringy. In the branch the 
part inside the bark is made up of 
two kinds of wood, heart-wood and 
sap-wood. The heart-wood, marked 
a , is really a pith, because it is made 















PLANTS 


475 


PLANTS 


up of cellular tissue and has no wood 
in it ; but it is not soft like common 
pith. It is the oldest part of the 
plant, and never grows any after the 
first year, because its cells or pipes 
are stopped up so that no sap can 
flow through them. The tree lives 
and grows only in its sap-wood, 
which is the part between the heart- 



Endogen, Top and Side View. 

wood and the bark. The sap-wood 
grows in rings around the heart- 
wood, as shown in the picture, one 
ring growing each year, so that by 
counting these rings in trees which 
have been cut down we can tell how 
many years old a tree is. The new 
ring always grows on the outside of 
the other rings, next to the bark, 
and plants which grow in this way 
are therefore called exogens (more 
fully, exogenous plants), or outside¬ 
growing plants. The growth is al¬ 
ways in warm weather, as the tree 
sleeps in winter. 

In the cornstalk the growth is dif¬ 
ferent. The stem is at first entirely 
made up of cellular tissue, but in 
time bundles of woody threads are 
formed which grow and push out 
the stem ; as the leaves grow, new 
threads grow and push down inside 
the older ones, shoving them toward 
the outside, and so on until the stem 
is of full size. Thus the growth is 
on the inside, instead of on the out¬ 
side, as in the exogen, and this kind 
of plant is therefore called an endogen 
(more fully, an endogenous plant) or 
inside-grower. 


Plants with outside-growing stems, 
especially those which live from 
year to year, usually have many 
branches ; but those with inside¬ 
growing stems seldom branch. 
Branches grow from buds. The 
plumule, or first shoot of the embryo 
of the SEED, is a bud which makes 
the main stem of the plant. Palm 
trees have no other bud, and there¬ 
fore branch only at the top ; but 
dicotyledonous plants have many 
side branches, and therefore have 
many more buds. These side buds 
grow out from the axils of leaves. 
The axil (Latin axilla , an armpit) 
of a leaf is the hollow part of the 
leaf stalk, on the upper side, where 
it joins the stem. Now as leaves 
grow on stems generally in two 
ways, either in pairs opposite each 
other, or singly one after the other, 
so the buds of branches grow in the 
same way. In the picture, I is a last 



i. Horse-Chestnut Shoot. 2. Hickory 
Shoot. 

year’s shoot of a horse-chestnut tree, 
from which the leaves have fallen ; 
but the leaf-scars, s, or places where 
they grew, are shown opposite each 
other, and the buds, b , are seen 
sprouting out above them. In 2, 
which is a last year’s shoot of hick¬ 
ory, the leaf-scars, s, are not oppo- 




















PLANTS 


476 


PLANTS 


site but one after the other, and the 
buds, b, grow in the same way. If 
all the buds grew, the branches of 
plants would be very regular, but as 
there is not room for all, only the 
stronger ones grow, and so the 
branches look irregular. 

The leaves of plants are gen¬ 
erally flat and thin, with one side 
turned toward the sky and the other 
toward the earth. If put in a room 
the leaves will turn toward the light 
—so much so that to have pretty, 
round plants one must turn the plant 
around daily. They are made up of 
the same two kinds of things as 
stems—woody fibres or threads, and 
cellular tissue. The woody part 
makes the framework of ribs and 
veins, and the cellular tissue the 
green pulp which is spread all over 
and is held in place by the frame¬ 
work. Over the whole is a thin clear 
skin. The larger parts of the frame¬ 
work are called ribs, the one down 
the middle being the midrib and the 
smaller parts veins. If you look 
carefully at several different kinds of 
leaves you will see that they are 
veined in different ways : in some 
the veins run in 
every way, making 
a kind of net-work, 
as shown in the pic¬ 
ture of a netted- 
veined leaf, while in 
the others the ribs 
and veins run par¬ 
allel or side by side 
from the base to the 
top of the leaf, or 
from the midrib to 
the sides of the leaf. 

Thus we have two 
classes of leaves, 
and parallel-veined. 
Netted-veined leaves belong to di¬ 
cotyledonous plants, whose stems 
are exogens or outside-growers ; and 
parallel-veined leaves to monoco- 
tyledonous plants, whose stems are 
endogens, or inside-growers. 

We have thus far shown only how 
plants grow from seeds ; but a great 



Netted-veined 

Leaf. 

netted-veined 


number of plants grow also from 
buds. Gardeners make plants grow 
from buds when they plant slips in 
the ground, or set grafts and 
buds into the stems of trees. Plants 
grow naturally from buds when they 



Parallel-veined Leaves. 


send up suckers from their roots, as 
most trees do, and form new plants 
by means of runners, like strawber¬ 
ries and many kinds of grass. Some¬ 
times too a branch bends down to 
the ground and takes root as shown 
in the picture on page 477. Such 
a branch is called a stolon. Cur¬ 
rant bushes usually spread in this 
way. Branches thus bent down by 
gardeners to make them take root are 
called layers. The tubers of pota¬ 
toes and of ground artichokes are 
filled with buds, or eyes as they are 
commonly called, from which a new 
crop is raised every year. Potatoes 
have seed, but they are seldom 
raised from them. Plants with 
bulbs, such as tulips, also form little 
bulbs from buds in their scales, 
from which new plants grow. 

All plants do not bear true flow¬ 
ers and real seeds (see Fruit), 
although all have something which 
answers to seeds ; and we can there¬ 
fore divide them into two series or 
sub-kingdoms, flowering plants and 
flowerless plants. Flowering plants 
include almost all trees, shrubs, 
and herbs. Ferns, mosses, sea¬ 
weeds, LICHENS, and FUNGI are 
all flowerless plants. They have no 
real seeds, but have small and sim- 







PLANTS 


477 


PLANTS 


pie bodies called spores which an¬ 
swer for seeds. As flowerless plants 
are very hard to understand, only 
flowering plants have been told 
about in this article. 

Thus the vegetable kingdom is 
divided into two sub-kingdoms, 
flowering plants and flowerless 
plants. Flowering plants are again 
divided into two classes, which 
differ from each other in stems, 
leaves, and seeds. These are : 

i. Dicotyledonous plants, exo¬ 
gens, or outside - growers, whose 
stems are made up of a central 
pith, of layers of wood around it, 
and of a bark outside; whose 
leaves are net-veined ; and whose 
embryo in the seed has two cotyle¬ 
dons or seed-leaves. 


2. Monocotyledonous plants, en- 
dogens, or inside-growers, whose 
stems are made up of woody threads 
mixed with pith, and whose bark 
will not peel off clean; whose 
leaves are almost always parallel- 
veined ; and whose embryo in the 
seed has but one cotyledon or seed- 
leaf. 

There are also differences between 
the flowers of these two classes, 
which the student will learn when 
he studies botany. These classes 
therefore may be easily told apart 
by looking at their stems, leaves, 
flowers, or seeds ; and by examining 
any seed we can tell what kind of a 
plant will grow from it. 

The classes are further divided 
into orders or families, each one of 



which is named after some chief 
plant of its order, as the oak family, 
the pine family, the rose family, the 
poppy family, etc. 

Flowerless plants are divided into 
three classes : i, Ferns, 2, Moss¬ 
es, 3, Lichens, seaweeds, and 

FUNGI. 

Plants have a great many uses. 
They keep the air pure by taking 
up the carbonic acid which is 
breathed out by animals, keeping the 
carbon and giving back the oxygen 
to be used by animals over again. 
The carbon which they thus get is 
changed into vegetable matter, on 
which all animals live, some by eat¬ 
ing it, and some by eating animals 
which have fed upon it. Thus the 
substance of all animals is made up 


from plants. They give us, too, not 
only food, but many comforts and 
luxuries, and even medicines. All 
our clothing comes from plants, not 
only what is made directly from 
them, as cotton and linen, but also 
silk, which the silkworm spins from 
leaves, and wool, which is made 
like flesh from the food of the ani¬ 
mal which bears it. Plants give us 
material out of which we build our 
houses, fences, and other buildings, 
and from which we make our fur¬ 
niture, tools, and a great number of 
other things ; and they furnish our 
fuel, both wood and coal, and sup¬ 
ply us with light, whether gas, oil, 
or candles. 

The word plant is from the Latin 
planta , a sprout or shoot. 










PLATINUM 


478 


PLOUGH 


PLATINUM, a metal and one of 
the ELEMENTS. It is commonly 
found, like GOLD, in grains, scales, 
or nuggets, and is got by washing 
away the earth and sand with which 
it is mixed. When pure, it is whit¬ 
ish gray (not quite so white as sil¬ 
ver), heavier than gold, as soft as 
copper, and may be hammered into 
thin plates and drawn out. into fine 
wire. It cannot be melted in any 
common heat, but only in a blow¬ 
pipe flame. As it does not rust in 
the air at any heat and is not eaten 
by any of the common acids taken 
alone, platinum is a very useful 
metal. The chemist uses it for cru¬ 
cibles, blow-pipe tips, and many 
other things, and large stills (see 
Alcohol) made of it are used in 
making sulphuric acid. Plati¬ 
num forms alloys with gold, sil¬ 
ver, and most other metals. Most 
of the platinum used in the arts 
comes from the Ural Mountains, 
Russia, though some is brought from 
South America, California, Ceylon, 
and Borneo. It is about five times 
as valuable as silver. 

The word platinum is in Spanish 
filcitina, which is from fllata> silver, 
and the metal gets its name from its 
color. 

PLOUGH, an implement for break¬ 
ing up or loosening the soil. Ploughs 
were in use in very ancient times, 
but they were mostly very rude in¬ 
struments, often little more than 



Ancient Greek Plough. 


sharpened crooked stakes, with a 
beam to draw them by. The 
Greeks, however, made better 
ploughs, and some used by them 
more than two thousand years ago 
were much like the best ploughs of 


the present day. It will be seen 
from the picture of an ancient Greek 
plough, used about two hundred 
years B.C., that the root-cutter and 
the wheel at the end of the beam are 
not new things, as many think. 



Modern Two-Horse Plough. 

The modern plough is made up of 
the beam (a), which is usually of 
wood, but sometimes of iron, and 
which has a wheel near its end to 
run along on the surface of the 
ground, and thus to keep the share 
from going too deep into the earth ; 
the handles or stilts ( b ), also gener¬ 
ally of wood, but sometimes of iron ; 
the steel knife or coulter (c), which 
cuts through grass and roots in front 
of the share ; the share (//), of steel 
or hardened iron, which cuts the 
earth at the bottom of the furrow; 
the mould-board ( e ), also of steel or 
hardened iron, which turns over the 
earth cut by the share ; and the land- 
side, not shown in the picture, or 
straight iron part, back of the mould- 
board, on which the plough stands. 
Side-hill ploughs are so made that 
the mould-board can be changed 
from one side to the other of the 
beam, so that the plough can come 
back and turn a furrow against the 
one last made. Subsoil ploughs 
have no mould-board nor share, but 
are made with a long flat point to 
stir up the soil in the furrow made 
by the common plough. Steam 
ploughs are now used to some ex¬ 
tent in England and on very large 
farms in this country. These have 
usually three or four shares and 







PLOVER 


479 


POMEGRANATE 


mould-boards, so as to turn as many 
furrows at once, and are drawn by a 
steam-engine which looks something 
like a locomotive. The engine may 
also be used to draw wagons on 
common roads, and to drive pumps, 
saws, threshing machines, and other 
machines. 

The word plough is found in differ¬ 
ent forms in many languages. In 
German it is pflug , in Danish plov , 
in Swedish plog , and in Russian 
and Polish p/ug. 

PLOVER. There are several 
kinds of plovers in the United States. 
The golden plover is brownish black 
on the back with golden spots, and 
black or gray and black on the 
breast. It lives in small flocks on 
the sea coast, makes its nest of 
dried grass in a hollow in the sand, 
and lays four eggs. The upland or 
field plover is brownish black on 
the back and yellowish white on the 
breast. It is found mostly in cul¬ 
tivated fields, and lives on seeds, 
berries, and insects. It gives excel¬ 
lent sport in the autumn, when it is 
fat and very good eating. Other 
common kinds are the ring plover, 
which has a white ring round its 
neck, and the piping plover, whose 
notes are sweet and sad. 

The plover belongs to the order 
grallatores , or wading birds. 

The word plover is in French 
pluvier , the rain-bird, which is from 
the Latin pluvia , rain ; and this 
bird is so called because it becomes 
restless and leaves on the coming of 
the rainy season. 

PLUM, the FRUIT of a tree of the 
same kind as the almond, peach, 
apricot, and cherry. It is not known 
whence the plum tree first came, 
but there are wild kinds both in the 
United States and in Europe. Of 
those in the United States the 
Chickasaw is one of the best. Other 
common ones are the yellow or red 
plum, which grows wild all over 
the country, and the beach plum, a 
small purple kind, which grows in 
the sands of the sea shore all along 


the Atlantic coast. The beach 
plum is apt to be a little bitter, but 
makes good preserves. The best of 
the cultivated plums is the green 
gage. The damson, a small black 
plum, gets its name from Damas¬ 
cus, from which place it is supposed 
to have come. Plums are eaten 
for dessert, and are made into pre¬ 
serves and prunes. A kind of 
wine is made from them in Europe, 
and a strong liquor is distilled (see 
Alcohol) from a mixture of plums, 
honey, and flour. 

The word plum is from the Anglo- 
Saxon piuma y plum. 

POLECAT, a small animal much 
like the weasel in shape, found in 
Europe and Asia. It is dark brown 
above and yellowish brown below, 
and has black legs and tail. It lies 
hidden all day long and comes out 
at night to rob hen-roosts and pig¬ 
eon houses ; it also kills rabbits, 
squirrels, and other small quadru¬ 
peds. When frightened or angry it 
gives out a very bad smell, which is 
disliked by all other animals. The 
polecat is killed for its fur, which is 
commonly called fitch, and the ani¬ 
mal itself is sometimes called fitchew 
or fitchet. 

The word polecat is supposed by 
some to be for Polish cat and by 
some for poultry cat, while others 
think that it is changed from foul cat. 

POMADE or POMATUM, a per¬ 
fumed grease for dressing the hair. 
It is made of some fine fat, such 
as lard or suet, which has been puri¬ 
fied, thickened with a little wax or 
spermaceti and perfumed with some 
essence. Many different kinds are 
made by the perfumers. 

The word pomade is from the 
French pommade, which is from the 
Latin pomum, apple, because it was 
formerly made by boiling apples in 
fat, by which the scent of the fruit 
is given to the fat. 

POMEGRANATE, the FRUIT of a 
shrub or small tree which grows 
wild in southern Asia, but which is 
now cultivated in many warm coun- 




POPLAR 


480 


PORCUPINE 


tries. Very fine pomegranates are 
raised in the southern United States, 
Mexico, and South America. The 
tree .grows sometimes three or four 
times as high as a man ; but is 
usually smaller. The fruit is about 
the size of a large orange, and has a 
thick leathery skin of a deep orange 
color tinged with red. The pulp 
and the seeds with which it is filled 
are the parts eaten. It is of a sweet 
delicate flavor, sometimes a little 
acid. Cooling drinks are made of it 
in hot climates, and in Mexico and 
South America it is distilled (see 
Alcohol) to make a kind of spirit 
called aguardiente. 

The rind of the fruit and the bark 
of the root contain much TANNIN, 
and are used for tanning the finest 
morocco leather. The bark of the 
root is also used as a medicine, es¬ 
pecially for worms. 

The word pomegranate means 
many-seeded fruit, it being from the 
Latin pomum , apple or fruit, and 
granatum , many-seeded. 

POPLAR, a tree of the same fam¬ 
ily with the willow, which grows 
chiefly in mild and cold climates. Of 
the several kinds of poplars in the 
United States the cottonwood is 
the most abundant, being found from 
New England to the Pacific coast. 
It gets its name from the downy 
cotton with which its seeds are cov¬ 
ered. Its flowers look something like 
a string of pearls, from which it is 
sometimes called the necklace pop¬ 
lar. Its wood is not very good, but 
it is much used in the West where 
other large timber is not easy to 
get. 

The Balsam Poplar or tacamahac 
and the balm of Gilead are also 
American varieties of the poplar. 
Their buds are covered in the spring 
with a sticky varnish called balsam. 

The White Poplar or abele, so 
called because its leaves are white 
underneath, was brought here from 
Europe. Its wood is used by cab¬ 
inet-makers, turners, and toy-mak¬ 
ers. 


The Lombardy Poplar, so called 

because it first became well known 
in Lombardy, although it came from 
the East, was once much planted in 
this country, especially in avenues, 
but is now seldom seen. It is an 
unsightly tree, and its wood is 
worthless. 

The word poplar is from the Latin 
populus , the poplar tree ; populus 
also means people, and the tree was 
so called because it was the tree of 
the people, having been planted 
much in old times in public places. 

PORCUPINE. There are several 
kinds of porcupines, all of which are 
covered with sharp quills, which 
they can make bristle or stand up, 
so as to protect them from their ene¬ 
mies. These quills commonly lie 
close down on the body, but when 
the animal becomes angry or afraid 
they all spring up and stand stiff as 
a forest of bayonets. If the animal 
is attacked, it turns its back toward 
its enemy, puts its head between its 
forepaws, makes a grunting noise, 
and tries to push its quills against 
the body of its foe. The wounds 
made by its quills are very bad and 
hard to cure, as the ends often stay 
in the flesh. 

The Canada Porcupine is the most 
remarkable of those living in Amer¬ 
ica. It weighs commonly about 
twenty-five pounds and is two and a 
half feet long, to the beginning of its 
tail, which is eight or ten inches 
more, but looks larger than it is on 
account of its long hair and bristles. 
Its fur is dark brown, sometimes 
mixed with gray. The quills, which 
are two or three inches long, are 
mostly hidden by the fur so that they 
are not seen until they stand up. 
This porcupine lives in the woods, 
where it feeds on the bark of trees, 
especially that of the elm and hem¬ 
lock. When it climbs up into a tree, 
it seldom leaves it until the bark is 
all eaten, excepting in very cold 
weather, when it comes down at 
night to sleep in some hollow place. 
As the tree is thus killed, it does 





PORPOISE 


4S1 


POTASH 


much damage to woods. The In¬ 
dians hunt it for its flesh, which they 
eat, for its skin, which they make into 
caps and other things, and its quills, 
which they dye of beautiful colors 
and use for ornaments. In New 
England the Canada porcupine is 
wrongly called the hedgehog. 

The Crested Porcupine is found in 
southern Europe, in Asia, and in 
Africa, but not in this country. It 
is so called because its quills stand 
up all over it like a crest, some of 
them being more than a foot long. 
It is larger than the Canada porcu¬ 
pine, and is brownish black, with 
white round the neck. It lives in 
holes between rocks, or in burrows 
which it digs in the earth, and in 
which it lies numb in the winter. 
Its food is mostly herbs and fruits, 
which it comes out at night to eat. 

The porcupine is a mammal of 
the order rodentia , or gnawing ani¬ 
mals. 

The word porcupine is from the 
Latin porcus, pig, and spina, thorn. 
The French call this animal pore - 
epic , spiny pig. 

PORPOISE. This animal is usu¬ 
ally five to six feet long, bluish 
black on the back, and white be¬ 
neath ; is shaped like a fish and lives 
all the time in the water, but 
breathes air and has to come to the 
top of the water to blow like the 
whale. It is common along the At¬ 
lantic coast, and may often be seen 
in bays and near the mouths of 
large rivers, playing and tumbling 
about in the waves. When swim¬ 
ming its round back looks like a hog 
in the water. Porpoises live mostly 
on fish and MOLLUSKS, and they will 
root like hogs in the sand in search 
of clams, sand eels and other food. 
Sometimes they hunt after sand eels 
in companies and drive them up 
into a mass, just as hunters drive 
game in some countries. For this 
purpose they form a circle about a 
shoal of these eels, and by swimming 
round and round, now on top of the 
water and now diving down, they 


soon force the frightened fish into a 
thick crowd on the top of the water, 
into which they can dash and seize 
a dozen or two at a mouthful. Por¬ 
poises sometimes swim in groups 
one after the other and so closely 
that they look like one long animal, 
and some think that they thus gave 
rise to the stories of the sea-ser¬ 
pent. Sailors eat the flesh of por¬ 
poises, which looks some like pork. 
A fine oil is made from their blub¬ 
ber or flesh, and good leather for 
the uppers of boots and shoes from 
their skins. 

The porpoise is a mammal of the 
order cetacea , and of the same fam¬ 
ily with the DOLPHIN. 

The word porpoise is from the 
old English porcpisce, which is made 
from the Latin porcus, hog, and 
piscis, fish. 

POTASH (potassium oxide), an 
alkali, much used in the arts. 
The potash of trade, usually called 
crude potash, is very impure, and is 
properly potassium carbonate, be¬ 
cause it contains CARBON as well 
as potassium and OXYGEN. It is 
commonly made out of wood ashes 
and the ashes of various plants. 
Once almost every farmer had near 
his house a tub called a leach-tub, 
filled with wood ashes which were 
kept wet with water. The water 
drizzled down through the ASHES, 
soaked up all the potash in them, 
and dripped out of a little hole in 
the bottom of the tub, turned into 
a strong yellow liquid called lye. 
This lye was afterward boiled in 
iron pots until all the water in it 
passed off as steam, leaving the 
solid potash on the bottom. The 
potash of trade is made in the same 
way, and great quantities of wood 
are burned in the forests in this 
country, Canada, Russia, and Ger¬ 
many, solely to get ashes for mak¬ 
ing it. 

Crude potash is largely used in 
the manufacture of glass, porcelain, 
earthenware, and soap. It is red¬ 
dish brown, but can be purified by 








POTASSIUM 


482 


POTATO 


heating in a furnace, and then be¬ 
comes pearly white, and is called 
pearlash. Saleratus is rightly po¬ 
tassium carbonate with more carbon 
added to it, so that it is potassium 
bicarbonate, but sodium bicarbon¬ 
ate is now mostly used instead of 
it. Caustic potash, much used in 
chemistry and in medicine, is made 
from crude potash, or potassium car¬ 
bonate, by dissolving it in boiling 
water and mixing lime with it. The 
lime seizes the carbon, unites with it 
to form calcium carbonate, and 
the rest of the liquid may then be 
drawn off and boiled until the water 
passes off as steam. When it be¬ 
comes thick, it is poured into moulds 
and left to harden. It is thus made 
into the little round sticks used by 
physicians as caustic. It is properly 
potassium hydrate, as it is made 
up of potassium, hydrogen, and 
oxygen. The chlorate of potash 
(potassium chlorate) is made up of 
potassium, CHLORINE, and oxygen. 
It is much used in medicine, espe¬ 
cially in cases of scurvy and rheuma¬ 
tism, in calico printing, and in mak¬ 
ing MATCHES and FIREWORKS. 

Potash is so called because it was 
formerly made by boiling down 
wood ashes in pots. 

POTASSIUM, a metal and one 
of the principal ELEMENTS. When 
pure it is silvery white, very bright, 
lighter than water, and at common 
heat soft as wax. It is never found 
by itself, as it has such a liking for 
OXYGEN that it will unite with it if 
left where it is, and form potassium 
oxide, an alkali commonly called 
potash. Therefore it can never be 
left where the air can get at it nor be 
kept in water, but has to be kept in 
PETROLEUM, which has no oxygen 
in it. If a small piece be thrown on 
to water it will at once fly around on 
the surface and unite with the oxy¬ 
gen with so much heat that the hy¬ 
drogen which is set free will catch 
fire and burn with a beautiful violet 
flame. The metal potassium is 
made by chemists by taking away 


the oxygen from potash. The salts 
of potassium are very useful in the 
arts. The most important of them 
are potash (potassium carbonate), 
made up of potassium and carbonic 
ACID ; nitre or SALTPETRE (potas¬ 
sium nitrate), made up of potassium 
and nitric ACID ; and chlorate 
of POTASH (potassium chlorate), 
made up of potassium, chlorine, 
and oxygen. What is commonly 
called “ cream of tartar” is made up 
of hydrogen, potassium, carbon, 
and oxygen (hydrogen potassium 
tartrate). 

Potassium gets its name from 
POTASH. 

POTATO, the tuber or root of a 
plant of the same family with to¬ 
bacco, the tomato, egg plant, and 
many other plants. Next after the 
cereals or grains the potato is the 
most valuable of all plants used for 
human food ; and, like maize or In¬ 
dian corn, it was first given to the 
world by America. It is often called 
Irish potato, but it was not known 
in Ireland until it was carried there 
from Virginia about three hundred 
years ago. It grows wild in Peru, 
Chili, and other parts of South 
America, and was carried thence to 
North America, it is thought by the 
Spaniards, for it is not known that 
any of the Indians of North America 
raised it before the white men came. 

The potato is now largely culti¬ 
vated in most mild climates, and to 
some extent in warm and cold cli¬ 
mates. There are a great number 
of kinds, which differ much in size, 
form, color, the time of ripening, 
and in the quantity which can be 
raised to the acre. New kinds are 
raised from the seed, but potatoes 
are usually grown by planting the 
tubers or cuttings of them, care 
being taken to have an eye in each 
piece. The tubers are not properly 
roots, but are underground parts of 
the stem of the PLANT, and are stores 
of food for the support of the new 
plants which are to spring from 
them. The earliest potatoes which 





POTTERY 


483 


POTTERY 


are brought to our markets come 
from the Bermuda Islands, where 
great quantities of them are raised 
every winter. As the climate there 
is too hot to keep potatoes through 
the summer, the seed has to be sent 
there from the United States every 
autumn. 

About three fourths of the weight 
of a full-grown potato is water, and 
of the other fourth about one sixth 
is GLUTEN and five sixths STARCH. 
The potato also contains a little of a 
poisonous substance called solanine , 
having a bad taste and smell, but 
which is taken out in boiling, as it 
is chiefly in the skin. It is this 
which gives the bad smell to the 
water in which potatoes have been 
cooked, and as it is unwholesome 
this water ought always to be thrown 
away. Potatoes should always be 
stored in a dark place, as the light 
is apt to make them green and bit¬ 
ter, as is often seen in those which 
in growing have come partly out of 
the ground. There is much solanine 
in such potatoes, and they are unfit 
to eat. 

Potatoes are used for food for do¬ 
mestic animals as well as for man. 
They are also largely made into 
starch, and in some countries this 
starch is turned into glucose or 
grape SUGAR. In Ireland whiskey is 
distilled (see Alcohol) from pota¬ 
toes, and in northern Europe potato 
brandy is made from them. 

The word potato is from the Span¬ 
ish batata , a name which belongs 
rightly only to the SWEET POTATO. 

POTTERY, anything made out of 
baked clay. When a child makes 
a dish out of soft clay and dries it in 
the sun, he becomes a potter. The 
first earthenware was probably 
made in this way ; but it was soon 
found out that it could be made 
much harder by baking it in the fire. 
Fire drives out the water and melts 
the sand in the clay, and thus makes 
it firmer and less easy to break. By 
and by potters learned how to mix 
other things with clay so as to make 


finer and more delicate pottery, to 
give it graceful forms, and to paint 
and decorate it, and in time the art 
of the potter became one of the most 
important known to man. 

Pottery may be divided into three 
kinds : earthenware, stoneware, and 
porcelain or china. 

Earthenware is soft and porous, 
that is, so full of little pores or holes 
that water will soak into it. A com¬ 
mon brick or a flower pot is the sim¬ 
plest kind of earthenware. The finer 
kinds of earthenware, of which all 
table ware that is not porcelain is 
made, is covered with a kind of glass 
varnish called a glaze, which fills up 
its pores and gives a smooth glassy 
finish to its surface. If it were not 
for this our earthenware tea-cups 
and coffee-cups would leak. The 
finest earthenware is often painted 
and beautifully decorated. Such 
earthenware is generally called fai¬ 
ence or majolica. Faience is a 
name taken from Faenza, a city in 
Italy, where much decorated earth¬ 
enware was once made ; and ma¬ 
jolica, or maiolica as it is sometimes 
called, is supposed to come from 
Majorca, an island in the Mediter¬ 
ranean, where the Arabs formerly 
made a great deal of fine pottery. 
Delft ware is a kind of faience or 
earthenware made at Delft in Hol¬ 
land. Terra cotta is a soft, porous 
kind of earthenware, much made 
into ornaments. It is sometimes, 
but not usually, glazed. Many busts 
and little statues are made of it. 

Stoneware is a very hard, dense, 
close-grained kind of pottery, and is 
either white or colored, glazed or 
unglazed. Common stone jars, such 
as preserve and pickle jars, are the 
cheapest kind of stoneware. Some 
stoneware is fine and can scarcely be 
told from earthenware. The chief 
difference is that in stoneware the 
clay is so melted together that it is 
not porous. 

Porcelain is the finest kind of pot¬ 
tery. It is very dense, hard, and 
fine-grained, and is white and trans- 




POTTERY 


484 


POTTERY 


lucent, that is, the light will shine 
through it. All the fine table ware 
usually called china (because the 
first was brought from China) and 
the beautiful vases made at Sevres 
and Dresden are of porcelain. The 
word porcelain comes from the Por¬ 
tuguese word florzellana , which was 
first given to a kind of majolica, but 
we do not know its exact meaning. 
Some say it was named from the 
ftorzellanci or ftorcellana shell, be¬ 
cause its surface looks like the en¬ 
amel of that shell; and others that 
the first cups brought from China 
were shaped something like this 
shell, which was called porcellatia 
from fiorcella, a little pig, because it 
looks something like a pig’s back. 

Pottery Manufacture. All kinds 
of pottery are made out of clay, but 
the clay is mixed with many differ¬ 
ent things, such as sand, flint (burnt 
and‘ground), feldspar, chalk, alum, 
soda, and bone ash. In making the 
common kinds of pottery the clay 
and other things are simply ground 
up in a mill with water into a kind 
of putty called “paste,” but the 
finer kinds need greater care in 
choosing and mixing the materials. 
Sometimes the materials are mixed 
together dry and then made . with 
water into a thin cream called 



“ slip,” which is afterward strained 
until it becomes a paste of the right 
thickness for moulding. 

After the paste has been made, it 
is formed into the various vessels on 
the potter’s wheel or lathe, which is 


shown in the picture. It is simply 
an upright shaft, a , with a small 
stone wheel on top, b, which is 
made to turn round by a large wheel, 
c, turned by a boy, or by a treadle 
moved by the workman’s foot. In 



Making a Jar. 

some potteries the lathe is turned by 
steam power. The potter’s wheel 
is sometimes called the throwing 
wheel, and the making of any vessel 
on it is called throwing, because the 
otter throws the soft clay down on 
is wheel to make it stick fast. If 
he wishes to make a stone jar, he 
first shapes it into a kind of cone, 
shown in a above, by pressing it 
with his hands, which he keeps wet. 
This softens it and works the air out 
of it. He then puts his thumbs into 
the middle of it, keeping his fingers 
on the outside, and makes it into the 
form shown in b. Afterward, with 
one hand inside and the other out¬ 
side, and the use of a sharp tool kept 
wet, he gives it the forms c and d. 
When it is done, the potter cuts it 
from the wheel with a fine wire, 
and it is set upon a shelf to diy until 
the time comes to bake it. 

























POTTERY 


485 


POTTERY 


Some articles are made in plaster 
of Paris moulds instead of being 
thrown on the wheel. Ewers or 
pitchers are mostly made in this 
way. The mould is in two parts, 
each part making one half of a pitch¬ 
er cut through the spout and han¬ 
dle from top to bottom. Each half 
is lined with a sheet of the paste, 
and the two parts are then put to¬ 
gether and joined by putting the 
hand inside and pressing the seams 
together with the fingers. Some¬ 
times pitcher moulds are made whole, 
with an inside and an outside part, 
and the paste, made very thin, is 
poured in so as to fill all the space 
between. The plaster of Paris mould 
takes up the water and the paste 
soon becomes dry enough to be 
taken out. The potter usually has 
about a dozen moulds near him, so 
that by the time they are all filled, 
the first one will be ready to empty. 
Tea-cups and other round cups are 
made in a mould which forms the 
outside. The mould is then put 
upon the wheel and turned, the in¬ 
side of the cup being shaped with 
the fingers and finished with a wet 
sponge. They are thus all made of 
the same size and shape. Handles 
are always made and put on after 
the pitchers or cups are moulded, 



being fastened on with a little wet 
paste, and the parts where they are 
joined smoothed with a wet sponge. 
Saucers and plates are made by 
pressing a thin sheet of paste on to 
a plaster of Paris mould, shaped like 
the inside. The whole is put on 


the wheel and the outside is shaped 
by a brass form or thin plate made 
to fit one half the bottom. As the 
wheel turns round the form presses 
on the mould and shapes the outside 
of the plate, paring off all the paste 
which is not needed, and making 
each piece of the same thickness. 



Seggar. 


Baking. When finished the pieces 
are dried in a drying room, and then 
carefully packed in coarse earthen¬ 
ware vessels called seggars, which 
are so made that they can be piled 
up one above another to a great 
height in the kiln. When several 
plates or other articles are put into 
one seggar, little pointed pieces of 
earthenware are placed between 
them, so that they cannot touch 
each other, as they would be apt to 
stick together when baked. Each 
seggar thus forms a small oven, in 
which one or more pieces are baked, 
and in which they are kept from 
being smoked and from being un¬ 
evenly heated. The baking, which 
usually takes a day and a half, has 
to be done with great care. When 
finished the fire is put out, and the 
whole is allowed to cool little by 
little, after which the seggars are 
taken out and unpacked. 

Glazing. The pottery, which at 
this stage is called “ biscuit” ware, 
is without any gloss, and so porous 
that water will soak into it. The 
next thing is to glaze it, so as to 
give it a smooth shiny surface and to 
make it water proof. The glaze for 
earthenware is usually made of white 
clay, ground quartz, feldspar, 
white lead, and some other things. 










































POTTERY 


486 


POTTERY 


All are ground fine and mixed with 
water enough to make a milk-like 
liquid. Each piece is carefully dip¬ 
ped into the glaze so as to cover it 
all over equally, and then set upon 
a bench. The water of the glaze 
soaks into the biscuit, leaving a thin 
film on the outside. The articles are 
again put into seggars, and baked in 
a glaze-kiln for about half a day, 
when they are cooled again slowly. 
The glaze is melted by this baking 
and spread evenly all over the sur¬ 
face. Paintings or other decora¬ 
tions on earthenware are put on the 
biscuit before the glazing. Designs 
for common earthenware are often 
printed in enamel colors on paper, 
and pressed on the biscuit while the 
ink is still wet. The biscuit takes 
up the ink, the paper is taken off, 
and the articles are then glazed and 
baked. The figures and colors are 
thus under the glaze, and cannot be 
injured. 

Porcelain Manufacture. Porcelain 
is made in much the same way as 
earthenware, but the materials are 
finer. The paste is made of a fine 
white CLAY called kaolin mixed 
with several other things, and much 
care has to be taken in throwing 
and moulding it. Some of the pieces 
are very thin, and only the best 
workmen can make them. Porce¬ 
lain is baked first with much less 
heat than earthenware. When cool 
it is dipped into a different kind of a 
glaze from that used on earthen¬ 
ware, and is then baked so hot that 
it melts and forms all over the arti¬ 
cle a glassy surface so thin and clear 
that light will shine through it. The 
glaze must be very carefully made, 
because if it melts too easily it will 
sink too much into the biscuit, and 
if it does not melt easily enough it 
will not make a smooth surface. The 
pictures on painted porcelain are 
sometimes put on the biscuit before 
it is glazed, and sometimes on the 
outside of the glaze. The paints are 
made of different colored glass 
ground up fine and mixed with oil 


of turpentine, and are put on 
with brushes. The porcelain is then 
heated in a kind of box called a 
“muffle” until the colored glasses 
are melted just enough to stick fast 
to the surface. 

Painting porcelain is very pretty 
work, and is now much done by 
ladies who have the taste and time 
for it. Plain ware ready to be deco¬ 
rated is made by many of the manu¬ 
facturers, and the right paints, put 
up in tin tubes like the oil paints 
used by artists, and the other things 
needed, are sold at most of the 
crockery stores. 

Very good table-ware porcelain is 
made in the United States, but the 
finer kinds come from France, Ger¬ 
many, and England. The most 
costly painted vases and other orna¬ 
ments are made at Sevres in France, 
and at Dresden in Germany ; but 
very beautiful ones are made also 
in Vienna and Berlin, and in several 
places in England. Splendid deco¬ 
rated vases, jars, and other orna¬ 
mental porcelain are brought also 
from China and Japan, where they 
have been made for many hundred 
years. The painting of porcelain 
and cloisonne work are told about 
under Enamel. 

History of Pottery. The people 
of ancient Nineveh knew how to 
bake and to glaze pottery, and both 
glazed bricks and tiles have been 
found in the ruins of that city. On 
the monuments of Thebes are to be 
seen pictures of potters at work, 
which show that earthenware was 
made many centuries before Christ 
in nearly the same way as it is now. 
The Phoenicians made fine pottery, 
and many beautiful vases, jars, 
lamps, cups, and other utensils of 
their manufacture were brought from 
Cyprus by General di Cesnola, and 
are now to be seen in the Metropoli¬ 
tan Museum in New York. The 
Greeks probably learned the art of 
making pottery from the Phoeni¬ 
cians and Egyptians,and the Romans 
learned it from the Greeks. The 






POTTERY 


487 


POTTERY 


Greeks were noted for the beauty of 
the form and the ornaments of their 
pottery, and many of the finest vases 
now made are imitated from those 
made by them. The Arabs learned 
from them and in time carried the 
art into Spain, where much beauti¬ 
ful pottery was made at an early 
date, especially in the island of Ma¬ 
jorca, where majolica ware was 
made. In the fifteenth century, the 
Italians began to make majolica and 
other wares, and soonFaenza, Flor¬ 
ence, and other cities had famous 
factories. All their ways of working 
were kept secret, but about the mid¬ 
dle of the sixteenth century, Bernard 
Palissy, a French potter, found out 
the way of making majolica, and 
also made many improvements in 
the art. He had seen some fine 
pieces of Italian work, and made up 
his mind that he would find out the 
secret. His experiments cost him 
a great deal of money, and he be¬ 
came so poor that he and his fam¬ 
ily were nearly starving ; but after 
sixteen years of hard work, he at 
last succeeded, and made better 
ware than the Italians themselves. 
Most of his pottery is ornamented 
with pictures of sea animals and 
plants, and his fish, crabs, shells, 
coral, and seaweed look almost as 
natural as life. Many of his works 
are still to be seen, and are highly 
valued. 

About the same time pottery was 
made in Holland, especially at 
Delft, where the blue ornamented 
ware called delft was first manufac¬ 
tured. From Holland the art was 
carried to England, where much 
delft ware was made.. About the 
middle of the last century, Josiah 
Wedgwood, an English potter, be¬ 
came very celebrated, and found out 
how to make many new and beauti¬ 
ful wares. Other potters became 
noted after him, and now much of 
the finest pottery comes from Eng¬ 
land, especially from Staffordshire, 
where there are many potteries. 
The making of fine table earthen¬ 


ware is now carried on in the United 
States at Trenton and Jersey City, 
New Jersey, at Liverpool, Ohio, and 
other places. 

The Chinese and Japanese have 
known how to make pottery from 
the most ancient times ; and the 
Chinese say that they made porce¬ 
lain before the time of Christ. Por¬ 
celain or china ware had been car¬ 
ried to Europe long before it was 
found out how to make it, which 
was not known until the seven¬ 
teenth century. It had been known 
for about two hundred years what 
the Chinese put into it, but the kao¬ 
lin or white CLAY used had not 
been found in Europe. In 1711 a 
man named Bottger, who was try¬ 
ing to find out the secret of porce¬ 
lain-making for the Elector of Sax¬ 
ony, was one day astonished to find 
that his wig was much heavier than 
usual. On asking his servant the 
cause, he was told that he had got 
out of hair-powder and had used a 
kind of white powdered clay to dress 
his wig with. Bottger examined the 
clay, and tried it in making porce¬ 
lain, and was delighted to find that 
it was true kaolin. A factory was 
built at Meissen, twelve miles from 
Dresden, and the porcelain, which 
is still made there, is generally called 
Dresden porcelain. Though Bott¬ 
ger tried to keep the secret, one of 
his workmen ran away with it to 
Vienna, where a factory was built in 
1720. These two factories have al¬ 
ways been noted for fine porcelain, 
and most of the little groups of 
painted china figures are made in 
them. A kind of porcelain was made 
in France about the same time, but 
it was not until 1786, when kaolin 
was found by accident by the wife of 
a country physician, that much of it 
was made. The principal French 
factory is at Sevres, where much of 
the finest porcelain is now made. 
Fine porcelain is also made in Staf¬ 
fordshire, England. Good porcelain 
is made in the United States at 
Greenpoint, Long Island, and at 




PRECIOUS STONES 


488 


PRECIOUS STONES 


Trenton, New Jersey. These fac¬ 
tories make chiefly plain tableware, 
but some fine decorated ware is now 
made at Greenpoint. 

The word pottery is in French 
poterie , which is from the Greek 
poterion , drinking cup. 

PRECIOUS STONES. Under this 
name are included all kinds of rare 
and beautiful stones which are worn 
as ornaments. They are sometimes 
called gems, but this name is more 
properly given to precious stones 
after they have been cut or engraved. 
Precious stones are found in differ¬ 
ent parts of the world, chiefly in the 
veins or cracks of rocks, in earth 
which has been washed down from 
hills, and in the gravel and sands 
of rivers. In their natural state they 
are usually rough and shapeless, like 
worn pebbles, and have to be cut 


and polished before they show their 
beautiful colors. 

Precious stones may be divided 
into three classes, according to the 
materials of which they are made : 
the carbon class, the alumina (see 
Aluminum) class, and the silica 
(see Silicon) class. The only one 
of the carbon class is the diamond, 
which is made up of pure carbon. 
In the alumina class are included 
all the stones properly called sap¬ 
phires, among which are the true 
sapphire, the oriental ruby, the 
oriental emerald, the oriental topaz, 
and the oriental amethyst. All these 
are made up of pure alumina, colored 
in different ways. The silica class 
includes the opal, the amethyst, 
and the AGATES, among which are 
the carnelian, chalcedony, onyx, 
sardonyx, and- blood stone. These 



are all made up chiefly of silica. 
Between the alumina class and the 
silica class are several kinds of 
stones, which are made up partly of 
alumina and partly of silica, united 
with some other things. Among 
these are the true emerald and the 
true TOPAZ, which differ from the 
oriental emerald and the oriental 
topaz. There are also some other 
stones, such as the garnet, made 
up of different things, which are 
counted among precious stones, 
though they are not worth much. 
The pearl, and some other things, 
such as coral, conch shell, am¬ 
ber, malachite, turquoise, and 
lapis-lazuli, though used in mak¬ 
ing jewelry, are not properly pre¬ 
cious stones. 

The most valuable of all the pre¬ 
cious stones, and those which rank 
the highest as jewels, are the ruby, 


the sapphire, the diamond, and the 
emerald. The diamond is generally 
called the most valuable of all stones, 
but this is an error ; a ruby and a 
sapphire of the same size would be 
worth more. The sizes of diamonds 
and other jewels are told by their 
weights, called carats. The sizes of 
jewels of one, two, three, four, and 
five carats are shown in the pic¬ 
tures. The lines on the sides show 
the height of each si one. A fine 
ruby of the size of one carat would 
be worth about $450, a sapphire 
$300, a diamond $150, and an emer¬ 
ald $100. 

Precious stones are used chiefly 
for ornament, but diamonds are 
used for cutting glass and for cut¬ 
ting other diamonds and precious 
stones, and diamonds, rubies, and 
sapphires are put into watches for 
the machinery to work in. Small 







PRINTING 


489 


PRINTING 


bits of precious stones are also made 
into lenses for MICROSCOPES. 

Artificial precious stones are made 
out of a kind of glass called strass 
or PASTE, which is made of all 
colors. Some of them are very 
beautiful, and can scarcely be told 
from real ones. A few real precious 
stones have also been made, but 
only very small ones. 

PRINTING. This art was known 
to the Chinese as early as the sixth 
century, but their printing is differ¬ 
ent from ours. We print from mov¬ 
able types, each of which is one let¬ 
ter, and which are set together so as 
to form words and lines and pages ; 
and after the printing is done they 
are distributed, that is, the pages 
are taken to pieces word by word, 
and each type put back into its little 
box ; but in the Chinese way, which 
is called block printing, each page 
is engraved by itself on a block 
of wood, and cannot be taken 
apart. It is not known who first 
found out how to print from mov¬ 
able types ; the Germans say that 
it was John Gutenberg of Stras- 
burg, but the Dutch say that 
Laurence Coster of Haarlem was 
the first to do it, and that Guten¬ 
berg, who was Coster’s workman, 
stole the secret from him. Print- 
ing types are described in the arti¬ 
cle Type. 

Composition. Printing may be 
divided into two parts : first, the 
composition, or setting up of the 
types, and second the press-work, 
or printing on the paper. The per¬ 
son who sets the type is called a 
compositor. He stands before his 
case, a high frame which holds two 
shallow trays divided into little 
boxes. One of these trays, called 
the lower case, lies in front on the 
top of the frame, and slopes a little 
forward ; the olher, called the upper 
case, is placed behind the lower 
case, and is a little more sloping. 
The lower case has fifty-four little 
boxes, in twenty-six of which are 
kept the twenty-six small letters of 


the alphabet, and in the others the 
figures, the punctuation marks, and 
little pieces of lead called spaces. 
The lower case boxes are of different 
sizes, because there are many more 
of some letters used than of others. 
In common printing only one z is 
used to sixty e's and forty a s and 
0’s. The upper case is divided into 
ninety-eight little boxes, all of the 
same size, which contain large and 
small capital letters and spaces. 

Italic or slanting letters (see Al¬ 
phabet) are kept in other cases. 

In setting type the compositor uses 
a composing stick and a rule. The 
composing stick is a little steel 
frame or box, with a bottom, one 
side, and two ends. One of the ends 
is movable and is fastened by a 
screw, so that it may be set to any 
width. In composing it is set just 



Composing Stick. 


the length of the line, and it will 
hold about fifteen lines of the type 
used in this Cyclopaedia. The rule 
is a piece of thin smooth steel of the 
length of the line and the height of 
the type. When the compositor is 
ready to set type, he takes the stick 
in his left hand, holding it with the 
bottom toward him with his thumb, 
which he puts inside of it, and 
places the rule in it against the side ; 
he then picks up the type, one by 
one, and sets them up against the 
rule, beginning at the right, and 
going toward the left, and placing 
the type with the nicks, which he 
feels with his fingers, outward. He 
does not look at each type, for he 
knows by long use in which box each 
letter is. When the line is filled up, 
he looks at it to see if the words are 








PRINTING 


490 


PRINTING 


spaced right—that is, if all the words 
are the same distance apart, and if 
not he arranges them as they ought 
to be. This is called “ justifying.” 
When the line is justified, he takes 
out the rule and places it in front of 
the line just set, and then goes on to 
set another line. Types are some¬ 
times set “solid” and sometimes 
“ leaded.” When solid, they are set 
up in the stick one line on top of 
another, so that the types of one line 
touch those of the next one ; when 
“ leaded” a thin slip of lead is put 
between the lines to keep them 
apart, so that when printed they 
have a more open look. 

If you try to read a line of type 
you will see that the letters are 
turned the wrong way. This is be¬ 
cause you look at them from the 
bottom. If you turn the line over, 
end for end, so that the right side 
will come on the left, and print from 
it, you will see that the letters will all 
come right, and that the line will 
read from left to right, just like a 
printed page. When the stick is 
full—that is, when as many lines are 
set up in it as it will hold, the com¬ 
positor empties it by sliding off the 
type on to a “ galley. ’ ’ Galleys are 
long narrow trays, made generally 
of brass, with a rim on the two sides 
and the upper end to keep the type 
in place. Each stickful of type is 
emptied into the galley one after the 
other until it is full. A galley will 
hold about eleven stickfuls of the type 
of this Cyclopaedia, or three columns. 
When the galley is filled the type is 
fastened tight with wedges so that 
it cannot be shaken or moved out of 
place. The face of the type is then 
inked by rolling over it a little roller 
covered with printer’s ink. This has 
to be done carefully, for if there is 
too much ink on the roller, it will 
fill up the type and make them blot. 
A sheet of paper about as large as 
the galley is now laid on the type, 
and a heavy roller covered with a 
piece of woollen blanket is rolled 
over it, or it is pressed in a proof- 


press. When the paper is taken up 
a copy of the type will be found 
printed on it. This is called a 
“proof.” The proof-reader reads 
the proof carefully and marks all the 
mistakes in it, when it is sent back 
to the compositor, who corrects the 
errors in the type. A second proof 
is then taken, and the proof-reader 
reads it to see if all the mistakes 
which he marked have been cor¬ 
rected. Sometimes several proofs 
are read. When it is found out that 
the type is right, the type in the dif¬ 
ferent galleys is made up into pages, 
when it is customary to read another 
proof called a page-proof, so as to 
be sure that everything is correct. 
As the pages are finished they are 
put upon the “ imposing stone,” a 
table with a thick smooth marble 
top, and made up into forms. 

A form is composed of as many 
pages of a BOOK as can be printed 
at once on one side of a sheet. The 
pages, which are so arranged that 
the sheet printed from them will 
come right when folded, are put 
together in an iron frame called a 
“ chase,” and tightly wedged so 
that none of the type can drop out 
when the form is lifted up from the 
imposing stone. This is called 
“ locking” the chase. The form is 
then “ planed ”—that is, the surface 
is made even by going over the face 
of the type with a wooden block 
called a “ planer” and forcing them 
down by blows of a mallet. It is then 
ready for printing. 

Printing Press. There are many 
kinds of printing presses, but I shall 
tell you about only three kinds, pla¬ 
ten presses, cylinder presses, and 
rotary powers. One kind of platen 
press is shown in the picture of the 
Washington press. In this the press 
is seen shut up ready to print, the 
form of type being under the platen 
a. When the press is open the form, 
which lies on a flat part called the 
bed, lies outside of the platen on 
the frame b. When the printer is 
ready to print, he rolls an inking 





PRINTING 


491 


PRINTING 


roller over the form so as to cover 
the face of all the type evenly with 
ink. He then spreads a sheet of 
damped paper on the under side of 
the tympan, a thin wooden frame 
so fastened with hinges on the right 
side of the bed that it can be raised 
up and shut down on it. The tym¬ 
pan has a kind of cover called the 
frisket, a frame made of thin iron 
which will shut down on the tympan 
so as to hold the sheet of paper and 
keep the ink from soiling its edges. 
After spreading the paper smoothly, 
the printer shuts down the frisket 
on it, which covers all the paper ex- 



Washington Press. 

cept the part to be printed on. He 
then turns down the tympan on to 
the form, which brings all the 
part of the paper uncovered by 
the frisket on to the face of the 
type. If you now look at the 
picture, you will see a little crank or 
handle, c, at the side of the press. 
The printer turns this round and 
the whole bed of the press, with the 
form of type and the tympan and 
frisket, moves along until it comes 
under the platen a. The platen is 
a heavy and strong frame of iron, a 
little larger than the form of type. 


The under side of it is smooth and 
flat, so that it will press evenly on 
all the type. As soon as the form 
comes under the platen, the printer 
takes hold of the lever or arm, d, 
and pulls it toward him. This 
brings the platen down very hard on 
the back of the tympan, and presses 
the sheet of paper to be printed 
down on to the face of the type. 
The printer then raises the platen 
from the type by pushing back the 
lever, and turns the crank back¬ 
ward, which brings the form and 
bed out from under the platen and 
into its place again. He next turns 
back the tympan and then 
the frisket, takes the printed 
sheet off the tympan, and 
lays it on a table, and is then 
ready to print another sheet. 
This kind of hand press is 
not much used now in book¬ 
printing. The platen presses 
now used go by steam, and 
the bed holding the form of 
type is pressed up against 
the platen, instead of the 
platen being brought down 
on to the type. 

In the cylinder press there 
is no platen, but the bed is 
shoved forward and back¬ 
ward under a great turning 
cylinder or roller, covered 
with a soft blanket or rubber 
sheet, and which rolls over 
the type and presses the pa¬ 
per down on to it. Most 
of the great daily newspapers are 
printed on the rotary press. This 
kind of press has no flat bed 
like the platen and the cylinder 
presses. The printing is done by 
stereotype plates which are not laid 
flat, as on the other presses, but are 
bent round and fastened on to the 
cylinder itself. The cylinder is just 
large enough to hold the plates, so 
that in turning round once it prints 
one side of the sheet. The paper 
is pressed against the type cylinder 
by a smaller roller which rolls on it 
and turns at the same time. In the 












PRINTING 


492 


PRINTING 


best newspaper presses, the paper, 
instead of being put in, or “ fed” 
as it is called, in sheets one at a 
time, is printed from a great roll, 
and the sheets cut off afterward. 
In the web perfecting press, made 
by R. Hoe & Company, of New 
York, the roll of paper, which is 
called the web and about four and a 
half miles long, is put above the 
press as shown in the picture, so 
that it will turn round easily, and 
the end of the paper is unrolled and 
drawn in by the press as fast as it 
is needed to print on. It moves at 
a speed of about nine or ten miles 
an hour. It goes down first be¬ 
tween one cylinder with the plates 
fastened around it and another cyl¬ 
inder that pushes the paper against 
the letters. This prints one side of 1 


Hoe’s Web Perfecting Printing Press. 

the newspaper. The web next 
passes between two more cylinders, 
which print the other side, and then 
between a third pair of cylinders, 
which make several cuts across the 
web at the right places, dividing it 
up into parts, each part being a 
newspaper fully printed. The pa¬ 
pers are not thus fully cut off, and 
the web moves on a little further 
until it comes to a set of rollers 
which turn faster than any of the 
others. By these each newspaper is 
separated from the one next to it and 
hurried along to the folding machine, 
where it is folded into the shape 
wanted far more neatly than can be 
done by hand, at the rate of about 
three hundred a minute. News¬ 
papers to be sent by mail are folded 
differently from those which are to 


be sent round by carriers, but the 
machine can be made to fold them 
in any way. The picture gives but 
little idea of the great size of this 
wonderful machine, which fills a 
space about twenty-four feet long 
and six feet wide. It is made up of 
a great many parts, all of which 
work together so perfectly that the 
machine needs but little care when 
printing. Only about twelve hun¬ 
dred sheets could be printed by a 
man on the old-fashioned hand press 
in a day, but this press will print 
eighteen thousand sheets in an hour, 
and fold them all. 

Books are generally printed in this 
country on the Adams press, in 
which the type is laid on a flat bed 
and pressed upward against the 
platen. Fine books, with fine illus¬ 
trations, and magazines, are 
printed on cylinder presses. 
When all the sheets of a book 
are printed, they are dried by 
hanging them across wires in 
a drying-room. The printed 
sheet is then quite rough, the 
type having made little dents 
all over it. To take these dents 
out the sheets are put, after 
drying, into a press where they 
are pressed very hard between 
sheets of smooth pasteboard. This 
makes the paper smooth, just as you 
see it in any bound book. After 
pressing, the sheets are ready to go 
to the binder. (See Book.) 

Stereotype and Electrotype Plates. 
Books are now seldom printed from 
the types themselves, but from 
plates made from the type. A plate 
has a face just like the type, but its 
back is solid lead, so that it cannot 
be taken apart. There are two kinds 
of plates, stereotype plates and elec¬ 
trotype plates. In making stereo¬ 
type plates one or more pages of 
type are locked in a chase. The 
face of the type is then oiled, and 
covered with a mixture of plaster of 
Paris (see Gypsum) and water, 
about as thick as cream, which is 
kept from running off by a raised 











PRINTING 


493 


PUMP 


rim. The oil prevents the plaster 
from sticking to the type, and in a 
short time it becomes so hard that it 
may be taken off,when it will be found 
to be an almost perfect mould of the 
type. This is now trimmed smooth 
on the back and edges with sharp 
knives and placed in a shallow iron 
pan so made that when it is put into 
a vessel of melted type metal the 
metal flows in and fills the pan. 
The pan is then taken out and 
cooled, and the plate, when cleared 
of the plaster, which is broken off 
from its face, will be found to be 
about a quarter of an inch thick. It 
is then carefully trimmed, and 
mended where letters are broken, 
and the back is shaved down until 
the plate is all over of the same thick¬ 
ness. It is then fastened to a wooden 
back which is just thick enough to 
make the whole as high as a type, 
and is ready to be made up into a 
form with other pages. Stereotype 
moulds for newspapers are generally 
made of a kind of papier-mache 
instead of plaster. Plates can be 
made much quicker in this way, it 
taking only about half an hour to 
cast a newspaper page. 

In making electrotype plates, the 
form is made up in the same way as 
in stereotyping. A sheet of wax 
fastened in an iron plate is laid 
down on the face of the type, and 
pressed on it until a perfect mould 
of the type is made in the wax. 
The mould is next taken off and 
covered with a thin coat of black- 
lead, when it is put into a bath 
containing a solution of copper, 
which, by means of electricity, 
as told about under Metal Work, 
is made to fasten itself in a thin film 
on the black-lead. When this has 
grown to be about as thick as a 
sheet of writing-paper, the mould is 
taken out of the bath and the cop¬ 
per taken off from it. The shell, as 
it is called, looks like a sheet of cop¬ 
per with all the letters punched up, 
but the face is an exact copy of 
the type. It must be backed before 


using, the same as the stereotype 
plate. 

The word printing is for imprint¬ 
ing, which is from the Latin im¬ 
printer e, to stamp. 

PRUNE. The best prunes come 
from France, where several kinds 
of plums are raised especially for 
making prunes. The chief kinds 
used are the quetsche plum, some¬ 
times called German prune, and the 
Juliana plum. They are dried in 
ovens which are slightly heated, 
and into which they are put several 
times. The finer kinds are made 
from a larger and sweeter plum, call¬ 
ed the Catherinea or St. Catherine, 
and are more carefully dried than 
the common ones. They are the 
ones which come packed in orna¬ 
mental paper boxes, the others 
being usually put up in wooden 
boxes and jars. The most French 
prunes come from Brignolles and 
Bordeaux. French prunes are gen¬ 
erally eaten by hand and not cooked 
as preserves. Cooking or stewing 
prunes are brought mostly from 
Bosnia and Servia ; those from Ser- 
via are dried over wood fires and are 
apt to be a little smoky. A few 
come from Hungary and Bohemia, 
but they also are smoky. 

The word prune is from the Latin 
prunum , a plum. 

PUMICE, a kind of mineral thrown 
out from volcanoes. It is very 
hard, brittle, and porous (full of lit¬ 
tle holes), and so light that it will 
sometimes float on water. It is of 
various colors, such as white, gray, 
yellow, brown, and black, but is 
commonly grayish white. Pumice 
is used both in the lump and ground 
to powder for polishing wood, 
stones, metals, ivory, glass, and for 
rubbing down parchment, vellum, 
and some kinds of leather. It is 
brought mostly from Italy and Ger¬ 
many. 

The word pumice is from the Lat¬ 
in pumex, pumice-stone. 

PUMP. In the article Barome¬ 
ter is told how the pressure of the 




PUMP 


494 


PUMP 


air on the surface of water will 
drive the water up into a tube from 
which the air has been sucked out. 
The common suction pump works 
on the same principle, as will be seen 



from the pictures, which show a 
pump in a well, the surface of the 
water being at c. In Fig. i the han¬ 
dle is raised as is always done in be¬ 
ginning to pump. This pushes the 



piston a down in the tube towards 
the water. If the piston were 
solid, it would push the air down be¬ 
fore it, and this would push the water 
down too; but it has a valve 
which opens on the top like a little 


door and lets the air pass up 
through it. The handle of the pump 
is next pushed down, which brings 
the piston up. As soon as the pis¬ 
ton begins to move upward the pres¬ 



sure of the air above shuts the valve 
so that the air which went up 
through it cannot get back again. 
This leaves some room below the 
piston. There is another valve b 



Fig. 4.—Force Pump. 

in the lower part of the pump, which 
in Fig. 1 is shown shut. When the 
piston moves up, as in Fig. 2, the 
pressure of the air on the. surface of 
the water c forces open the valve 
b, and the water passes up into the 






























































PUMP 


495 


PUMPKIN 


pump and fills the space where the 
air was. If the handle of the pump 
be now raised again, the piston a 
will go down below the rest of the 
air and into the water, which passes 
up through the valve a. When the 
piston goes down, the valve b closes 
so that the water which passed up 
cannot go back again, and the next 
time the piston goes up the water is 
raised so high that it flows out of 
the spout, as in Fig. 3. Thus, the 



Fig. 5.—Chain Pump. 


piston draws out the air in the 
pump, and the pressure of the out¬ 
side air on the surface of the water 
in the well at c forces the water up 
the pump. 

The Force Pump is much used for 
forcing water up into the higher 
stories of dwellings. In this pump, 
which is shown in Fig. 4, the piston 
a has no valve in it, but fits tightly 
in the tube. When it is raised up 


the air above it is pushed out, and 
this leaves an empty space below, 
between the piston and the water ; 
or rather it would leave an empty 
space if the water did not rush in to 
fill it. Just as soon as the piston 
goes up the valve b opens, and the 
water rushes up from the well and 
fills the tube below the piston. If 
now the piston be brought down by 
pushing down the handle of the 
pump, the water is pushed down 
again. This closes the valve b, so 
that the water cannot get back into 
the well again ; so it is forced to go 
up through the valve e into the pipe 

d. When the piston is raised again 
the water in d would be pressed 
back into the pump again by the 
air above, if it were not for the valve 

e , which closes and stops it. The 
valve b then opens again and lets in 
more water ; the piston comes down 
again, the valve b closes again, and 
the water again opens the valve e 
and forces the water above up the 
pipe d, and so it goes on until the 
water in d is forced up as high as 
wanted, when it runs into a tank 
made for it. 

The Chain Pump, Fig. 5, is an end¬ 
less chain, with little cups or round 
flat pieces on it, which passes 
through a pipe just large enough to 
fit the cups. The chain goes over a 
wheel or barrel A at the top, which 
is turned round by a winch, and 
around another wheel B under the 
water. The water is carried up the 
pipe by the cups until it is high 
enough to pour out of the spout, as 
in the picture. The arrows show 
the way the chain moves round. 

The word pump is found in many 
languages ; in French it is pompe , 
in Italian pompa, in German pumpe, 
in Swedish pump , and in Danish 
poynpe . It is perhaps an imitation 
of the sound of splashing water. 

PUMPKIN, the fruit of a plant of 
the GOURD family, to which the 
squash also belongs. The plant is 
a vine which often runs more than 
twice the length of a man, and which 


































PUMPKIN 


496 


PUTTY 


has large, yellow, bell-shaped flow¬ 
ers. The fruit of the common field 
pumpkin is at first green, but when 
ripe is bright orange ; but there is a 
kind which is dark green when ripe, 
and another which is striped green 
and yellow. Some think that the 
pumpkin came from Asia, and some 
that it was raised by the Indians in 
America before the whites came. 

Pumpkins are now used chiefly for 
feeding cattle. They are used in 
New England for making pies and 
as a boiled vegetable like squash, 
but some kinds of squashes are pre¬ 
ferred to them by most people. 
Boys make jack-o-lanterns out of 
pumpkins by cutting off the top, 
scraping out the soft part, and cut¬ 


ting eyes, nose, and mouth on one 
side. When a lighted candle is 
put in one of these at night, it looks 
much like a fiery face. 

The word pumpkin was spelled 
pompion in old times, and is from 
the old French pompon , Greek pe- 
pon , a melon. 

PUTTY, a cement used by gla¬ 
ziers to fasten panes of glass into 
window frames, and for other pur¬ 
poses. It is made of whiting (see 
Chalk) and linseed oil. The whit¬ 
ing is dried, pounded, and sifted, 
and stirred into the oil. When it is 
stiff enough it is worked by hand, or 
with a hammer, on a board until it 
is smooth. 

The word putty is in French potte. 





QUAIL. There are several kinds 
of quails in the United States, but 
the one best known is the common 
quail, or Bob White, so called be¬ 
cause the notes of the male birds in 
the breeding season sound like “ Ah, 
Bob White. ’ ’ This bird is brownish- 
red marked with gray on the back, 
and whitish marked with brown 
below. It is called quail in the Nor¬ 
thern States, and partridge in the 
Middle and Southern States ; but 
some other name ought to be given 
to it, as there are no real quails nor 
partridges in America. Quails live 
in flocks and usually have a leader 
whose call they follow. They 
spend their time usually on the 
ground, seeking their food, which is 
mostly seeds, berries, and insects, 
among the leaves, and seldom fly up 
into trees excepting when fright¬ 
ened. They rest at night on the 
ground, sitting together with their 
heads outward, so that they can 
each fly in a different way if dis¬ 
turbed. They lay ten or fifteen pure 
white eggs, and raise only one 
brood each season. Many quails 
are caught in snares and nets every 
year, and sent to our markets. The 
flesh is white, tender, and juicy, and 
much prized for food. 

The European Quail, which is a 
little smaller than the bird called 
quail in this country, lives in Africa 
in the winter and in Europe in the 
summer. Every spring great flocks 
of them cross the Mediterranean 
and spread all over Europe, going 
back to Africa in September. In the 
Greek Islands they sometimes come 


in such great numbers that the sky 
is said to rain quails. They are so 
tired after their long flight that they 
often fall to the ground, and thou¬ 
sands are sometimes found drowned 
along the shores, which have fallen 
into the sea on their way across. 
The quail is a very quarrelsome bird, 
and in ancient times it used to be 
trained to fight like the game cock. 
Many are still trained in this way 
in the East, and made to fight for 
amusement. 

The quail belongs to the order 
rasores, or scratching birds, and to 
the partridge family. 

The word quail is in old French 
quatlle , and in Italian quaglia. 

QUARTZ, the common name of 
silicon oxide or silica, the most 
abundant of all minerals. When 
pure it is found in beautiful crystals, 
as clear as ice or glass. It is so 
hard that it will scratch glass and 
strike fire against steel. When 
quartz is of a violet color it is called 
AMETHYST. Other kinds of quartz 
are called agate, carnelian, chal¬ 
cedony, flint, and JASPER. Clear 
quartz or rock crystal was once 
much used for vases, cups, and or¬ 
naments, but glass, which can be 
cut much easier, has now mostly 
taken its place. 

The word quartz is from the Ger¬ 
man quarz , a name once given to 
crystals which form in the earth. 

QUINCE, the fruit of a tree which 
grows in mild climates, and which 
belongs to the same family with the 
pear and the apple. The quince 
tree is little more than a shrub, 



QUINCE 


498 


QUINCE 


though it sometimes grows nearly 
three times the height of a man. 
The flowers are white or rose-color, 
and the fruit is usually pear-shape, 
but some quinces look more like an 
apple. Quinces are not good to eat 
raw, but are usually preserved, or 
made into tarts, marmalade, or jelly. 
They have a fine flavor, and are 
used* to season other preserves. A 
drink, something like cider, is also 
made from them. Quince seeds 


have much mucilage in their skins, 
and jelly is sometimes made from 
them and the parings of the fruit. 
A dressing for the hair, called ban¬ 
doline, is also made from the muci¬ 
lage, mixed with alcohol and per¬ 
fumed. 

The word quince is in French 
coing, and is from the Latin cy- 
donia , so called from the town of 
Cydonia, in Crete, which was noted 
for its quinces. 





E 


RABBIT. The common tame rab¬ 
bit of the United States was brought 
from Europe, where it is found 
wild. In its wild state it is always 
grayish-brown on the back, and 
whitish below ; but tame rabbits are 
of different colors, usually black, 
gray, sandy, or white. In Europe 
rabbits live in large colonies called 
warrens, in burrows dug deep into 
the ground. They usually hide dur¬ 
ing the day, coming out at night to 
eat, and they often do great damage 
by gnawing the bark off young 
trees, and by spoiling growing crops. 
Many are caught every year in 
snares and traps, or by pouring 
water into their warrens and forcing 
them to run out, when they are 
caught by dogs. Another way of 
catching them is by sending a fer¬ 
ret into their holes. Their flesh is 
very good for eating, and their fur 
is much used for making felt hats. 
The skins, too, are made into glue 
and size. Furriers sometimes dye 
and dress rabbit furs so that they 
can scarcely be told from ermine, 
mink, minever, or other costly furs. 
The wild gray rabbit of the United 
States is more like a hare than a 
rabbit in its habits, as it does not 
live in burrows, but makes its nest 
in thick bushes, or in holes in trees. 
It is much hunted, its flesh being 
juicy and sweet. 

Rabbits make pretty and interest¬ 
ing pets, and are very easy to raise. 
There are a good many fancy kinds 
sold by dealers, some of which have 
large lop ears which hang down to 
the ground, while others have one 


ear standing up and the other hang¬ 
ing down. Some of these are sold 
for high prices, but they are no bet¬ 
ter for pets than other rabbits, and 
are sometimes much more trouble¬ 
some, as they are more apt to be sick. 
The strongest and healthiest rabbits 
are those which are nearest in color 
to the wild rabbit, then the black or 
black and white, and after them 
the sandy and the gray and white. 

The male of the rabbit is called a 
buck, and the female a doe. A pair 
will increase very fast, as they will 
have young six or seven times in a 
year, and four to six each time. In 
buying young rabbits, always take 
the largest ones where there are the 
fewest in a litter. The best time to 
get them is when they are about six 
weeks old ; keep them in pairs in 
separate boxes until they are about 
four months old, and alter that give 
each one a separate house to live in. 

The rabbit house, or hutch as it 
is commonly called, should stand in 
a dry place, where it can have 
plenty of air. The loft of a barn or 
shed is a good place. Each hutch 
should be set on a stand about three 
feet high, as shown in the picture, 
which gives the form of a very good 
kind of hutch. It should be made 
about four feet long, two feet high, 
and a little deeper than it is high ; 
and be divided into two parts, a liv¬ 
ing-room and a bedroom. Each of 
these should have a door in front, 
the one belonging to the living-room 
being open and covered with wires. 
There should also be a door between 
the two rooms, which is commonly 



RABBIT 


500 


RADISH 


left open, but may be closed by 
pushing down the slide A. The 
bottom should be made of a smooth 
board, so that water will run off from 
it, and in front should be a strip of 
wood, B, which may be taken out 
so that the bottom board may be 
cleaned, which should be done every 
day. All parts of the hutch which 
are easily gnawed should be covered 
with tin, as rabbits have sharp teeth 
and will often eat their way out of a 
hutch in a single night. 

Rabbits should be fed regularly, 
and three times a day. Young rab¬ 
bit keepers often lose many of their 
pets from neglect. At first they feed 
them too much, and afterward they 
forget them or feed them irregu¬ 
larly, and they are surprised in a 



Rabbit Hutch. 


short time to find them sick and 
moping. Rabbits need two kinds 
of food, dry food, such as oats, 
wheat, and buckwheat, with bran 
and dry clover, and soft vegetable 
food, such as the tops of carrots 
and parsnips, cabbage, parsley, 
and fine grass and fresh clover. 
They should generally have more 
dry than juicy food, and to very 
young rabbits only a very little juicy 
food should be given. If fed prop¬ 
erly and kept in good dry hutches, 
rabbits will keep bright and healthy, 
but if not rightly cared for they will 
show it very quickly. 

The rabbit is a mammal of the 


order rodentia , or gnawing animals, 
and of the hare family. 

The word rabbit is in provincial 
French rabotte , and in Dutch robbe. 

RACCOON. The common rac¬ 
coon is as large as a small dog or 
fox, and is brownish-gray, with 
black or brown markings. It has a 
sharp nose, a bushy tail, and strong 
claws with which it climbs trees. 
Raccoons usually lie in their holes 
in the daytime, and prowl around at 
night in search of food. They feed 
mostly on small mammals, such as 
rabbits and squirrels, on birds and 
eggs, frogs, shell fish, insects, 
roots, and nuts ; but are very fond 
of ripe corn, and often do much 
damage in cornfields. They are 
very skilful in opening oysters, biting 
off the hinge and scraping out the 
meat with their paw. They also 
watch the turtle lay its eggs in the 
sand, and steal and eat them as soon 
as it is gone. 

The raccoon is found almost all 
over the United States, but most 
abundantly in the Southern States. 
The negroes have great sport in 
winter in hunting it with dogs. 
When a “coon,” as they call it, 
runs up into a tree, they cut it down 
if they cannot shake the animal off, 
and when it falls the dogs catch it. 
Raccoons are sometimes tamed, and 
they make very cunning pets, follow¬ 
ing their master like a dog. The 
flesh of the raccoon tastes something 
like pig, and is very good eating. 

The raccoon is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh eating 
animals, and of the bear family. 

The word raccoon is probably 
from the French raton , a little rat 
or raccoon. 

RADISH, a garden plant, culti¬ 
vated for its root, which is eaten 
raw as a relish. It is supposed to 
have first come from Asia, but it 
was brought to America from Eu¬ 
rope, where it has been raised from 
the most ancient times. The root is 
made up mostly of water and woody 
fibre, and is not worth much for food. 
















































RAFT 


501 


RAILROAD 


The word radish is from the Latin 
radix , a root. 

RAFT, a float made of logs, or 
beams and planks fastened together. 
Sometimes rafts are built especially 
to carry heavy things, such as 
large masses of stone, down a river 
or along the sea-coast; and they are 
sometimes made to save people 
and goods on in cases of shipwreck. 
Rafts are used too as stagings by 
ship carpenters in repairing vessels, 
and sometimes in building floating 
bridges across streams. 

Another kind of raft is made for 
the purpose of conveying logs and 
other timber from one place to 
another, generally from the upper 
waters of a river, where the logs are 
cut, to the lower parts, where they 
are sold. Very large rafts of this 
kind are often seen on the river 
Rhine, in Germany. Great num¬ 
bers of trees are cut down every year 
along the little streams which empty 
into the upper parts of the Rhine. 
These are made into small rafts and 
floated down into the Rhine to the 
village of Namedy, where the river 
is wide. Here they are all fastened 
together and made into one large 
raft, sixty or seventy feet wide, or 
twice as wide as an ordinary house, 
and more than ten times as long. 
The raft is made of several layers of 
trunks of trees, placed one above 
the other and fastened together with 
chains. On the top is built a plat¬ 
form of oak and pine timber, and on 
this are houses for the owner and his 
workmen. There are often fifteen 
or twenty of these little houses, so 
that the raft looks like a floating vil¬ 
lage as it goes along. There are 
sometimes seven or eight hundred 
rowers and other workmen on one 
of these rafts, as well as poultry, 
pigs, and cattle. Such a voyage 
down the Rhine is quite costly, as it 
takes much time, and a great deal 
of food is needed for so many men. 
It requires too a great deal of skill to 
manage so large a float, as the river 
is full of rocks and shoals, and has 


many windings in it. Such rafts 
are often sent down rivers in this 
country, especially in the north¬ 
west, where timber is plentiful. 
These rafts are floated in pieces 
down the streams to the great lakes, 
where they are put together into 
large ones, and towed to different 
places. 

The word raft is probably from 
the Danish and Swedish raft } a 
beam or rafter. 

RAGS. All kinds of worn out 
woven goods, no matter how small 
the pieces, are valuable in the manu¬ 
facturing arts. Cotton, linen, and 
hemp rags are made into paper ; 
and woollen and worsted rags, if 
in good condition, are tom to pieces 
by machines, mixed with fresh wool, 
and re-spun, while the refuse is 
ground into powder, dyed various 
colors, and used by makers of 
PAPER HANGINGS as flock. Great 
quantities of rags are brought to this 
country every year for these uses ; 
and great quantities also are col¬ 
lected by the street scavengers and 
sold to the junk dealers, who sort 
them and sell them to the paper 
makers and woollen manufactures. 

The word rag is from the Anglo- 
Saxon hracian, to tear. 

RAILROAD or RAILWAY. Rails 
were used on roads for wagons 
drawn by horses much before this 
cenlury, but the first railroad worked 
by steam and used for carrying pas¬ 
sengers was opened in England in 
1825 ; so that railroads have been 
known only a little more than fifty 
years. The first very successful 
locomotive, which ran thirty-five 
miles an hour, was built by George 
Stephenson, in England, in 1829. 
Soon after this railroads were built 
in the United States, and we have 
now more miles laid than in all the 
countries of Europe put together. 

Survey of Road. Before beginning 
to build a railroad between two 
places, careful surveys of the routes 
which the road might follow are 
made, to find out which is the best 




RAILROAD 


502 


RAILROAD 


and cheapest way. The manner in 
which a road is built depends much 
on the use to which it is to be put. 
If there is to be but little travel on 
it, it will be cheaper to follow the 
natural shape or the ground as 
nearly as possible, but if there are to 
be many trains and they are to be 
run very fast, it will be necessary to 
make the road as nearly straight 
and as nearly level as possible. 
This will cost much more, especially 
if there are hills to be cut away or 
tunneled through, rivers to be 
bridged, or valleys filled up. All 
this is the business of the civil en¬ 
gineer, who draws the plans and 
calculates the cost of the road. 

Grading. In building a railroad 
the first thing to be done is to make 
the road bed, that is, the bank of 
earth, gravel, etc., on which the ties 
and rails are to be laid. This is 
called grading. Where the road 
bed is piled up above the surface it 
is called an embankment; where it 
is made by cutting through a hill, 
leaving it open at the top, it is called 
an excavation ; and where it is cut 
through a hill so as to leave the 
earth arched overhead, it is called a 
tunnel. The grade of a road is 
the rise or fall of its bed ; where it 
is perfectly flat it is said to be 
level ; where it rises in any part 
above the level so as to run up hill, 
it is called an up grade ; and where 
it falls below the level, so as to run 
down hill, it is called a down grade. 
The turning of a road out of a 
straight line is called a curve. 

Superstructure. Everything built 
on the road bed, including the ties 
or sleepers, the rails, and their fast¬ 
enings, is called the superstructure 
(from Latin superstruere , to build 
upon). The ties, which are commonly 
of white oak, hemlock, yellow pine, 
or chestnut, are laid upon the road 
bed, and the spaces between them 
are filled up with gravel or broken 
stone, called the ballast. Rails are 
made of either wrought iron or 
STEEL ; but steel rails are fast taking 


the place of iron ones on all the 
large roads, because they last much 
longer and are less apt to break. 
They are rolled out while red hot 
between great iron rollers, in mills 
made for the purpose, and are 
usually thirty feet long, or five times 
as long as a man. There are many 
different shapes of rails, but the kind 
chiefly used in the United States is 
the T rail, made like the letter T 
turned upside down. 

Rails are fastened to the ties by 
spikes driven in by their side, and 
the two ends of different 
rails are held togetherby 
two flat pieces of iron, 

C, called fish-plates, one 
on each side, fastened 
by four screw bolts 
which pass through t Rail, 
holes in the ends of the 
rails, AA. As iron swells when 
heated, and contracts or shrinks 
when cold, rails are a little longer 
in the summer than in winter. The 
rails of a railroad are therefore al¬ 
ways laid a little way apart at the 
ends, as shown in the picture at B ; 
for if they were put close together 
there is danger that the heat will 
swell them and push them out of 
place so that they will tear up the 
track. For the same reason the 


B 



Fish Joint, 

screw holes have to be made longer 
than they are high, so that the 
screws can move backward and for¬ 
ward a little when the rails become 
heated. The width between the 
rails is called the gauge. The usual 
gauge of railways in this country is 
four feet eight and a half inches. 
This was the width of the first loco¬ 
motive engine brought here from 
England, and the same gauge has 
been kept up almost everywhere, al¬ 
though we have some railroads with 









RAILROAD 


503 


RAILROAD 


a much wider gauge, and some in 
the West have a gauge of only three 
feet. In laying rails around curves 
the outer rail is always put higher 
than the inner one. If they were 
laid of the same height the last car 
of a train going round a curve would 
be apt to be thrown off the track; 
but when the outer rail is higher the 
weight of the cars comes on the in¬ 
side of the curve and keeps them 
from falling outward. 

On the best roads two sets of rails 
are usually laid, forming what is 



called a double track, one of which 
is always used by trains going in one 
way and the other by trains going 
the other way ; and some roads 
which do a great deal of business 
have three and even four tracks. But 
many have only one track, and such 
roads have switches or turnouts built 
where trains going different ways 
meet, so that one train can turn off 
on to a side track and let the other 
one pass, when the train thus switch¬ 


ed off can come back on to the main 
track again. In the picture A B 
and C D show the main track, and 
A E and C F the switch or turn-out. 
All these rails are fastened to the 
ties excepting the parts between a 
and b and c and d, which are made 
so that their ends, b and d , may be 
moved backward or forward by 
pushing or pulling the switch bar, S. 
As the rails are placed in the picture, 
a train running from A C down¬ 
ward would pass off the main 
track on to the switch. Two guard 
rails, r x and r x, are put opposite 
where the switch crosses the main 
track, to keep the wheels from slip¬ 
ping off when they cross on to the 
pointed piece, O, which is called a 
frog. The shape of the frog can be 
seen in the larger picture. If the 
train is to be kept on the main track 
the switch is moved to the other side, 
so that the ends b and d fit on to the 
main track. 



Railroad Frog. 


Rolling Stock. This is everything 
which rolls over the road, including 
locomotives and tenders, passenger, 
baggage, and freight cars. Steam 
engines to run on wheels were made 
for common roads a little more than 
a hundred years ago, and about the 
beginning of this century one was 
made to run on rails ; but it was 
not until the year 1829, when an 
Englishman named George Stephen¬ 
son built the “ Rocket,” which ran 
thirty miles an hour, that the rail¬ 
way engine came much into use. 
Though this locomotive differed 
very much from those now built, 
yet it had in it all the principles 
which make them so strong and 
swift. The locomotives used in the 
United States do not look like the 
English locomotives, and differ from 
them in many things which our 















RAILROAD 


504 


RAILROAD 


space will not allow us to tell about. 
The American locomotives are set in 
front on trucks, much like those un¬ 
der our cars, as shown in the picture 
below, which fits them for running 
on rougher roads than can be run on 


by the English engines, in which the 
wheels are much stiffen They also 
have a cab or house behind for the 
engine-driver, and a cow-catcher in 
front. Cabs are now being built on 
some English engines, and will prob¬ 
ably soon be used on all ; but cow¬ 
catchers are not needed in Europe, 
as all the railroads are fenced in so 
that cattle cannot get on the tracks. 
Locomotives are now made very 
large and heavy, and are much 
stronger than they used to be. 
Trains are now drawn by them at 
the rate of forty to fifty miles an 
hour, and one has run about eighty 
miles in an hour. 

The machinery of the locomotive 
cannot well be described in a small 
space without pictures ; but it is 
made up of a boiler with a fire-box 
at one end, the gases and heat 
from which are carried through R 
the boiler in metal pipes or tubes 
which lead into the smoke-stack 
or chimney. These tubes give off 
a great deal of heat and turn the 
water into steam very quickly. 

On each side of the boiler, at its 
front end, is a cylinder or iron barrel 
in which a piston (see Steam En¬ 
gine) works, being pushed in and 
out by the action of the steam. 
These pistons and the parts con¬ 


nected with them turn the driving 
wheel and make the locomotive go. 
Locomotive engines are what are 
called high - pressure engines, that 
is, they do not turn the steam back 
to water and use it over again as in 
the low-pressure steam 
engine, but let it escape 
into the air after it is used. 
In the eastern part of the 
United States anthracite 
COAL is mostly burned now 
in locomotives, but in some 
places bituminous coal is 
burned, and in others wood. 

In England passenger 
cars are very different from 
those used in this country, 
being made like three or 
four stage-coach bodies put 
together, with doors opening into 
each on the side. They have no 
end doors, and there is no way 
of going from one car to another 
excepting by walking along a foot¬ 
board on the outside, as shown in 
the picture. These cars, or car¬ 
riages, as they are called, are only 
about half as long as American cars, 
and have only four wheels, like any 
common carriage. American cars 
are usually forty-five to sixty feet 
long, and are run on trucks (called 
bogies in England), one at each end, 
and each truck having from four to 
eight wheels. The common truck 



American Railroad Truck. 

with four wheels, two on each side, 
is shown in the picture. It is made 
up of the truck-frame, A, and two 
pairs of wheels, D D, and is fitted 
with strong India-rubber springs, 
E E E. The parts marked B B are 



English Railway Coach. 













































RAIN 


505 


RAINBOW 


called axle-guards. The body of 
the car sits on C, and is so fastened 
that the truck can turn under it like 
the front axle of a common wagon. 
The brakes on the wheels are shown 
at R R. The wheels do not turn on 
the axle, but are fixed tight to it, so 
that when the wheel turns around 
the axle turns also. 

Horse railroads, so common in 
almost all the cities of the United 
States, have come into use but lately 
in Europe, where they are generally 
called tramways. 

In London there is a steam city 
railroad, nineteen miles long, run¬ 
ning mostly underground. It is not 
so pleasant to ride on as the elevated 
railways in New York city, which 
run on iron structures like long 
bridges, built above the streets 
about as high as the second story 
windows of the houses. 

RAIN. There is always a large 
amount of watery vapor in the air. 
While this is kept warm enough it 
remains there, but if the heat falls 
below the dew point, the vapor 
will be condensed or turned to water, 
and will change, according to cir¬ 
cumstances, to dew, rain, SNOW, or 
HAIL. If the vapor be condensed 
near the surface of the earth, it 
turns to dew, but if the condensa¬ 
tion takes place high up in the air, 
the particles of vapor begin to fall of 
their own weight, and, uniting with 
others as they come down, form 
drops of rain. When the rain 
cloud is near the earth it is usually 
full of water, and the rain drops are 
much larger than those which fall 
from a higher cloud. 

Rain purifies the air by washing it, 
by mixing the air of the upper re¬ 
gions with that of the lower regions, 
and by cleansing the earth so that 
bad gases are not so apt to rise from 
it. Rain is usually pure, but takes up 
from the air as it falls a little car¬ 
bonic acid and AMMONIA ; and it 
is this which makes it better for 
plants than pump water. In some 
parts of the world little or no rain 


falls, and those places are conse¬ 
quently dry and treeless ; and in oth¬ 
er places it rains almost every day. 
More rain falls in mountainous than 
in level countries, because the cur¬ 
rents of air, warmed by blowing over 
the earth, strike against the sides of 
the mountains, and are thus turned 
upward into the cooler air of the 
higher regions, where they are con¬ 
densed and fall as rain. 

The word rain is from the Anglo- 
Saxon regen or ren , rain, from the 
Latin rigare , to wet. 

RAINBOW. In the article Light 
is told how white light is made up 
of seven different colors, and how 
these colors may be separated by 
causing a beam of light to shine 
through a prism. These same seven 
colors are seen in the rainbow, put 
together in the same order, namely, 
violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, 
orange, red, and they are made in 
the same way, only that the rays of 
light shine through rain drops in¬ 
stead of through a prism. The white 
light is thus separated into the colors 
out of which it is made, and these 
colors are so reflected from the 
round rain drops that they are made 
to form a circle. We can generally 
see only half the circle, or a little 
less than half ; but if we were on the 
top of a high mountain we could see 
much more. Sometimes rainbows 
are made by the sun’s rays falling 
on the spray rising from waterfalls, 
and then the whole circle can usually 
be seen. 

The rainbow can be seen only 
when the sun shines during a fall of 
rain, and when the sun is in one 
side of the heavens and the rain in 
the other, so that we can stand 
with our back to the sun and look 
at the rain. If the sun and the rain 
are in the same direction from us, 
no rainbow can be seen. Most rain¬ 
bows are seen in the afternoon, when 
the sun is in the west, and rain 
clouds come from the west and clear 
up by passing off to the east, but 
sometimes one is seen in the morn- 





RAISIN 


506 


RAT 


ing. Rainbows are never seen in the 
middle of the day, because the sun 
is then above us and we cannot 
stand between it and the rain. 
Sometimes two rainbows are seen at 
once, one outside of the other one. 
The inner or primary (Latin primus, 
first) bow, as it is called, is always 
the brighter, and the red band of 
color is always on the outside ; the 
outer or secondary (Latin secundus , 
second) bow is much fainter in color, 
and the red band is always on the 
inside. This is because in the pri¬ 
mary bow the sun’s rays are only 
reflected once, while in the secondary 
bow they are reflected twice, which 
makes them fainter in color, and 
turns them upside down. Rainbows 
are sometimes formed at night by 
the moonlight; but they are not so 
bright as those seen in the daytime. 

The word rainbow is from the 
Anglo-Saxon renboga , from ren, 
rain, and beogcin , to bend. 

RAISIN, the dried fruit of the Eu¬ 
ropean grape vine. Raisins are 
dried in two ways : in one the stalk 
of each bunch of grapes is cut nearly 
in two, and the grapes are then left 
to dry on the vines ; in the other, 
the bunches are wholly cut off and 
hung up or laid on floors to dry. 
The first kind are the best, and are 
called Muscatel raisins, or raisins 
of the sun. The finest come from 
Malaga and Valentia in Spain. The 
second kind are called Lexias. 
When dried the raisins are dipped in 
hot lye, made from wood ashes, in 
which is mixed a little olive oil and 
salt, afterward dried again in the 
sun, and then packed in boxes for 
sale. A few raisins are made in 
California. 

Sultana Raisins are made from a 
kind of grape which has no seeds. 
They are sometimes called Smyrna 
raisins, because they are brought 
from Smyrna in Asia Minor. 

Zante Currants are another kind 
of raisins made from small grapes 
about as large as peas, which grow 
in the island of Zante and in other 


Greek islands. Great numbers of 
these grapes are raised there, and 
there is a large trade in the dried 
fruit. In old times these grapes were 
called corinths, because many grew 
near Corinth. In some old books 
they are called “currans,” and some 
think that out of this grew our word 
CURRANT. 

The word raisin is from the 
French raisin , grape. 

RASPBERRY. The wild bush or 
shrub on which the raspberry grows 
is rightly named the bramble, and 
it belongs to the same family with 
the BLACKBERRY. Several kinds 
of raspberries grow wild in the 
United States, the best of which are 
the red, found in the Northern and 
Middle States, and the black, called 
sometimes blackcap and thimble- 
berry, which is common as far south 
as Georgia. The cultivated red 
raspberry was brought to this coun¬ 
try from Europe. Raspberries are 
used for dessert, for jams, jellies, 
and sweetmeats, and are made into 
a kind of wine, from which a strong 
spirit can be distilled (see Alcohol). 

The raspberry is not a real berry, 
but a collection of stone fruits. 

The word raspberry is made up of 
rasp and berry ; some think it is 
called rasp from the roughness of 
the fruit, and others think that it is 
from the Italian raspo , a bunch or 
cluster of berries ; berry is from the 
Anglo-Saxon berie. 

RAT. There are two kinds of 
house rats in the United States, the 
black rat, and the brown or Norway 
rat, as it is sometimes wrongly 
called. Both came first from central 
Asia into Europe, and were brought 
thence to America in ships, the 
first about the middle of the six¬ 
teenth century, and the second 
about the beginning of the Revo¬ 
lutionary war. The black rat is 
smaller than the brown, and rather 
cleaner in its habits, preferring the 
upper parts of houses to the cellars, 
sewers, and other damp and dirty 
places where the brown rat lives. 





RAT 


507 


RATTAN 


The two kinds do not like each 
other, and the brown rat, which is 
the stronger of the two, has waged 
such fierce war against the black one 
as to drive it almost entirely away 
from many places. 

Rats increase very fast, having 
young three to five times a year, 
and ten to fifteen at a birth. If 
means were not taken to destroy 
them they would soon overrun the 
country; but they are hunted by 
men, dogs, weasels, and cats, and 
they themselves kill and eat the 
young and weak of their own race. 

Rats do much damage in houses 
and often injure the farmers’ crops, 
but they are very useful in eating 
both animal and vegetable sub¬ 
stances which if left to decay would 
make sickness. Their teeth are 
sharp and strong, so that they can 
easily gnaw wood, and even bone 
and ivory. Their senses are sharp, 
and they are very cunning animals. 
They often use their tails to get 
food out of bottles or other vessels 
too narrow to get their heads in. 
A lady once found that her jelly 
jars, which were kept on a shelf in 
the cellar, had been robbed, though 
they were covered tightly with 
pieces of bladder. On looking at 
them more carefully she saw that a 
little round hole had been gnawed 
through the covering of each jar, and 
that the jelly had been lowered just 
about the length of a rat’s tail. She 
afterward found out that the rats 
had gnawed through the bladder and 
drawn the jelly out little by little by 
running their tails down through 
the holes. 

A lady in New York once tried to 
poison the rats in her house by put¬ 
ting near their holes pieces of meat 
spread over with phosphorus 
paste ; but, strange to say, though 
the meat was carried off every day, 
the rats seemed to grow more nu¬ 
merous all the while. After watch¬ 
ing a longtime, she at last found out 
the reason. In an alley next to the 
house was a hydrant, from which, 


the end being broken off, the water 
was running all the time. Under 
this she found several pieces of the 
meat, and she saw some of the rats 
carry the poisoned meat from the 
back door of the house into the alley 
and put it under the running stream 
of water. After it was washed they 
would eat it. 

The flesh of rats is eaten by the 
Chinese and some other Asiatic peo¬ 
ples, and by some African tribes, 
and their skins are made into a fine 
kind of leather for gloves. There 
are men who make a business of 
catching rats for their skins. 

The rat is a mammal of the order 
rodentia , or gnawing animals, and 
of the same family with the mouse. 

The word rat is from the Anglo- 
Saxon rcet , rat. 

RATCHET, a small piece of metal 
hung on a pivot at one end so that 
the other end can fall of its own 
weight into the teeth of a wheel, as 
shown in the picture. It is also 



Ratchet Wheel and Ratchet. 


called a pawl or click. As will be 
seen, the wheel can move only the 
way the arrow points, as the ratchet 
prevents its turning backward. 
Such a wheel is called a ratchet 
wheel. 

The word ratchet is in French 
rochet ; in Italian, rocchetto means 
the cog-wheel of a mill. 

RATTAN, a kind of palm tree, 
which grows in the East Indies. 
Some rattan palms are low bushes, 
some are very tall trees, and some 
have a reed-like slender stem, sel¬ 
dom more than an inch thick, which 
climbs like a vine over the tops of 












REINDEER 


508 


REINDEER 


trees, sometimes for several hun¬ 
dred feet. These long stems are 
much used for making ships’ cables, 
cables for suspension bridges, and 
other kinds of ropes. Great quanti¬ 
ties of them are sent to Europe and 
the United States, where they are 
made into various kinds of plaited and 
wicker work ; and many articles of 
furniture, ladies’ work baskets, and 
other things are manufactured from 
them. Malacca canes are made from 
a kind of rattan palm. 

The word rattan is from rdtan , the 
Malay name of the tree. 

REINDEER. In the article Deer 
is told about the caribou, or Amer¬ 
ican reindeer, which is believed to 
be only a kind of the reindeer of the 
Old World ; but the name reindeer is 
generally given only to those in the 
cold northern parts of Europe and 
Asia, where they are used as beasts 
of burden and draught. The rein¬ 
deer of Lapland is about four and a 
half feet high at the shoulder, or as 
large as the red deer of England, 
but its body is heavier. Its legs are 
well formed and strong, and its feet 
are broad and well fitted to travel on 
the ice and frozen snow. Its hair is 
rough and thick, and is brownish 
yellow in winter, but in summer is 
grayish white. The head is wide 
and much like that of the ox. and 
both the males and the females have 
horns, which are shed every year. 

The reindeer is very valuable to 
the Laplander, who could not live 
in his cold icy country without it. 
It is at once his horse, his cow, and 
his sheep ; for he drives it in har¬ 
ness, milks it, and makes cloth of its 
hair. Its milk is said to be better 
than that of the cow, and from it ex¬ 
cellent butter and cheese are made. 
Its flesh is very sweet and whole¬ 
some, but generally the animal is 
too valuable to kill. Its hair is 
easily spun and woven into cloth, 
and its skin makes fine leather. 
From its horns are made knife han¬ 
dles, spoons, and many other things, 
and its dried dung is used for fuel. 


The harness of the reindeer is very 
simple. A skin collar is fastened 
around its neck, and from this a 
single trace passes down between the 
legs and under the belly, and is fast¬ 
ened in a hole in the front of the 
sled. The driver uses but one rein, 
which is tied to the bottom part of 
the animal’s horn, and drops it on 
the right or the left side of the back 
as he wants to go one way or the 
other. The sled, called a pulka , is 
like a canoe, and has no runners, 
but sits flat on the ground. It is very 
light and will turn over easily ; but 
the Laplander is so skilful that he 
rides over the steepest and most 
slippery places with ease and safety. 
Harnessed in this way, the reindeer 
can travel very fast. On level ground 
it can go as many as twenty miles an 
hour ; but its common gait is from 
twelve to fifteen miles an hour. In 
Sweden once a reindeer carried an 
officer with important dispatches 
eight hundred miles in forty-eight 
hours, but the poor animal died 
after it. The picture of this reindeer 
is shown in one of the palaces. 

The poorest Laplander keeps sev¬ 
eral reindeer, and many keep hun¬ 
dreds and some even thousands in a 
great herd. They are driven out in 
the daytime to feed on the LICHENS, 
which they root up with their noses 
from under the snow, and are kept 
at night in sheds or in places sur¬ 
rounded by high fences to protect 
them from wild beasts. The herds 
have to be watched carefully, as the 
reindeer is apt to run away and join 
wild reindeer in the mountains. 
Each one is branded, that is, has 
burned on it with a hot iron the 
mark of its owner, so that it may be 
known if it strays or gets mixed with 
others. 

The reindeer in Siberia are larger 
than those in Lapland, and are used 
not only to draw sledges, but also 
under the saddle. They are very 
hard to ride, for the skin on the 
shoulders is so loose that the saddle 
moves from side to side. When it 




REPTILE 


509 


REPTILE 


tips to the left the rider has to lean 
to the right, and when to the right 
he must lean to the left, or he will 
be apt to lose his balance and fall 
off. The sled used in Siberia is 
different from that in Lapland, hav¬ 
ing high runners, and the reindeer 
are usually driven in pairs instead of 
singly. 

The reindeer is a mammal of the 
order ruminantia, or cud-chewing 
animals. 


The word reindeer is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon hrdndedr , reindeer. 

REPTILE. Like other vertebrate 
ANIMALS, reptiles have a backbone 
with a spinal marrow running 
through it, but the other parts of 
the skeleton are much more varied 
than in mammals, birds, and fishes. 
The snakes have only a skull, a 
backbone, and ribs, while in the tur¬ 
tles and tortoises the breast-bone is 
spread out to form the under shell 



Skeleton of Turtle. 


and the ribs are made into the upper 
shell. In the picture the under shell 
of the turtle is taken off so that the 
whole skeleton can be seen. The 
chain of bones making up the back¬ 
bone reaches from the head to the 
end of the tail. Like mammals and 
birds, reptiles breathe air through 
lungs, but like fishes they are cold¬ 
blooded, and therefore do not feel 
common changes in heat or cold. 


For the same reason they are slower 
in their motions than warm-blooded 
animals, and cannot keep up their 
movements so long ; but their life is 
not so easily destroyed, and they will 
bear more bruising and maiming. 

Excepting the turtles and tor¬ 
toises, reptiles are generally long, 
the body being round and ending in 
a long tail. The serpents are with¬ 
out feet, but almost all others of this 








REPTILE 


510 


RIBBON 


class have four limbs. The outer 
covering of the body varies : some 
of the lizards have regular scales like 
fishes ; others and the serpents have 
small scales on the true skin, which 
are covered with another skin ; 
while the crocodiles and turtles have 
hard bony plates. The senses of rep¬ 
tiles are duller than those of mam¬ 
mals and of birds, but not so dull 
as those of fishes. They are almost 
all flesh-eaters. The tortoises and 
crocodiles bite up their food, but 
the snakes swallow theirs whole. 
All reptiles are oviparous (Latin 
oviparus , from ovum, egg, and 
parere, to bring forth), that is, their 
young are hatched from eggs laid by 
the parent. But they are not usually 
hatched by the heat of the body, like 
those of birds, but are laid in warm 
sandy places, where they are open to 
the rays of the sun, or on heaps of 
vegetable matter which in rotting 
furnish heat enough to hatch them. 

Most of the reptiles live in warm 
countries, in which also the largest 
kinds are found. In cold countries 
many of them hibernate (Latin hi- 
bernare , from hiems, winter), that is, 
they pass the winter in a torpid or 
sluggish state, sleeping most of the 
time. 

Reptiles are divided into four 
orders, as follows : 

I. Crocodiles, including the croco¬ 
diles of Africa and of Asia, and the 
ALLIGATORS of America. Croco¬ 
diles usually live in the rivers of 
warm countries. They are among 
the largest of living reptiles, and are 
covered with a rough, hard, scaly 
coat, which forms the epidermis or 
outer skin. The skull is long, and 
they have only one row of sharp 
teeth. Their feet are webbed, and 
fitted with strong claws. The croco¬ 
diles come nearer to the birds in the 
way they are made than any other 
reptiles, having, among other like 
things, a stomach much like a giz¬ 
zard, and a skin which can be drawn 
over the eye. 

II. Turtles, including tortoises. 


III. Snakes. 

IV. Lizards. 

Reptiles belong to the third class 
of vertebrate animals. 

The word reptile is in Latin rep- 
tilis , which comes from repere , to 
crawl or creep. 

RESINS, a class of substances ob¬ 
tained from plants, and which are 
very useful in the arts. They are 
made up of carbon, hydrogen, 
and OXYGEN, and are probably the 
essential oils of the plants oxidized, 
or hardened by the oxygen of the air. 
They will dissolve in alcohol, ether, 
and other things, but not in water 
like the gums. Among the hard res¬ 
ins are copal, lac, mastic, benzoin, 
etc. ; and among the soft resins, 
turpentine, storax, and copaiva. 
Common resin is told about under 
Turpentine. 

The word resin is from the Latin 
resina, resin. 

RHUBARB, the dried root of a 
plant which grows in central Asia. 
The best rhubarb formerly came 
from Turkey and Russia, but now 
the most of that used in the United 
States is brought directly from 
China. It is used as a medicine, es¬ 
pecially in cases of diarrhoea, and is 
given to children who have eaten 
things which do not agree with them. 

Pie-plant. The rhubarb of our 
gardens, commonly called pie-plant, 
was brought to western Europe 
from the banks of the Volga, about 
three hundred years ago. Its leaves 
were first used for greens, as we 
now use spinach, but only the stalks 
are now eaten, either as a kind of 
preserve or made into pies. 

The word rhubarb is from the 
Greek Rha, the ancient name of the 
river Volga, on whose banks it 
grew, and bar bar a, foreign. 

RIBBON. Ribbons are made 
chiefly at St. Etienne in France, Basel 
in Switzerland, Coventry in England, 
and Crefeld in Prussia. The French 
and the Swiss ribbons are mostly 
made by hand, and are the best in 
the world. English ribbons are 






RICE 


RIFLE 


5 ii 


made by machinery, and are not 
considered so good as those made in 
France. The best ribbons are made 
of Italian and French silk, but 
cheaper kinds are made of inferior 
silk, and in some much cotton is 
used. Galloons are made largely of 
cotton, and some ribbons are now 
made entirely of it, and afterward 
printed in colors. Fine ribbons are 
now made in Paterson, New Jersey. 

The word ribbon, Old English 
riban , French ruban, at first meant 
a red ribbon, and is from the Latin 
ruber, red. 

RICE. This grain first grew in 
the East Indies, where it has been 
raised since the most ancient times, 
but it now grows in all the warm 
parts of Asia, Africa, and America. 
It is cultivated chiefly in China. 
Japan, Madagascar, the East and 
West Indies, the south of Europe, 
and in the United States and Cen¬ 
tral America. The best in the world 
grows in the United States, in North 
and South Carolina. It is said that 
the seed came from Madagascar. 
The rice plant is a kind of grass 
which thrives best in low damp 
lands, as it needs a great deal of 
water. After the seed has been 
sown the field is usually flooded with 
water several inches deep until the 
seeds sprout. The water is then 
drawn off, but the field is again 
flooded before the grain ripens, and 
the higher the water rises the higher 
the rice grows, the ear always keep¬ 
ing above the water. It commonly 
grows three or four feet high, and 
bears its grain in heads, much like 
oats. 

A few days before the rice is 
ready to cut, the water is drawn off 
from the field and the grain is cut 
with sickles and spread out to dry. 
The next day it is tied up in sheaves 
or bundles, carried on to dry 
ground, and piled up in stacks. The 
rice is separated from the straw in a 
threshing machine, from which it 
comes out with the husk on. The 
husk is taken off in a mill, where 


the rice passes between large grind¬ 
ing stones, which rub it off and leave 
the grains white and clear. As many 
of the grains are broken in this 
grinding, the rice is then turned 
round and round in a barrel made of 
wire netting, the meshes of which 
grow larger toward the bottom. In 
this way it is divided into several 
kinds : first the flour falls through 
the fine netting at the top, then the 
small pieces through the next larger 
holes, then the “ middling” rice or 
large pieces pass through, and lastly 
the whole grains fall out at the end. 

Rice is the principal food of nearly 
a third of the human race, mostly in 
hot climates, such as southern China, 
India, Burmah, and Siam, yet it is not 
so good for food as wheat and some 
other grains. More than nine tenths 
of rice is made up of starch and 
water, and only about a third of the 
other tenth is GLUTEN ; so that it 
makes, when eaten, more fat than 
muscle. The Japanese make a kind 
of beer, called saki, and the Chinese 
several kinds of wine out of rice, 
and the arrack of the East Indies is 
distilled (see Alcohol) from it. 
Starch for laundries and muslin man¬ 
ufactories is made largely from rice : 
the straw is plaited for hats, and the 
waste part furnishes food for cattle. 

Rice Glue or Japanese cement is 
made by mixing rice flour with cold 
water, and then boiling it until it is 
thick. When made very thick, it 
may be pressed in moulds and made 
into models, busts, and other things. 

Rice Paper, used by the Chinese 
for painting flowers, insects, and 
other small things on, is not made 
from rice, but is the inner bark of a 
kind of tree. 

The word rice is from the Latin 
oryza, Greek oruza, -rice. 

RIFLE. The first firearms for 
hand use were simply long tubes 
without any lock, which were fired 
by putting a live coal or a lighted 
slow-match to the touch-hole. These 
tubes sometimes had a long straight 
handle which was held under the 





RIFLE 


512 


RIFLE 


arm when the piece was fired, but 
they were commonly laid on a 
wooden frame or on a wall. 

The Match-lock gun, which came 
into use about the end of the four¬ 
teenth century, was fitted with a 
kind of lock in which the burning 
match was brought down to the 
powder in the little pan beside the 
touch-hole by pulling the trigger. 
This was a clumsy way of firing a 
gun. Each soldier had to carry sev¬ 
eral yards of slow-match, which was 
a kind of soft rope or cord so made 
that it would burn very slowly. Its 
fire was apt to be put out by the 
rain, and when the wind blew the 
powder was often blown out of the 
pan so that the gun would not go 
off. 

The Wheel-lock gun, first made in 
Nuremberg in 1517, had a toothed 
wheel which turned round quickly 
when the trigger was pulled and 
struck fire on a flint, the sparks from 
which kindled the powder in the pan. 
This gun was better than the match¬ 
lock, because the pan had an iron 
cover which opened when the lock 
struck the flint, and so the wind and 
rain did not hinder it from being 
fired. But it could not be fired 
very fast because the lock had to be 
wound up with a key like a clock be¬ 
fore being used. Before this time the 
gun had been generally called ar¬ 
quebus or harquebus, but the wheel- 
lock gun was given the name of 
mousquety from mouchety a sparrow- 
hawk. 

The Flint-lock gun came into use 
in the seventeenth century. In this 
the flint was made to strike fire by 
causing it to fall against the top of 
the powder pan. This forced the 
top of the pan open, and the sparks 
thus fell into the pan and on the 
powder. In 1671 the French began 
to use this gun, which they called 
fusil, from the Italian word focile , 
a flint. In 1686 the English armed 
three regiments (the 7th, 21st, and 
23d) with fusils, from which they 
were given the name of Royal Fusil- 


eers, which they still bear. The 
English did not begin to call these 
guns muskets until 1738. 

The Percussion-lock musket was 
first made in the beginning of the 
present century, but it did not come 
into general use until after 1840, up 
to which time the flint-lock musket 
was used in all the armies of the 
world. The percussion-lock musket 
has fitted to the side of the barrel a 
little tube, called the nipple, which 
opens into the barrel at its back 
end. This tube is just large enough 
to hold a percussion cap, a little cap 
made of thin sheet copper, covered 
on the bottom of the inside with 
percussion powder, a kind of pow¬ 
der which explodes when struck. 
The lock is so made that when the 
trigger is pulled, a part called the 
hammer is brought down by a strong 
spring on to the cap. This fires the 
percussion powder, and the fire from 
it is forced through the nipple into 
the powder of the barrel. This kind 
of gun was generally used in all ar¬ 
mies until rifles made to be loaded 
at the breech with brass cartridges 
were introduced. 

Rifle. The old kinds of guns had 
smooth bores, that is, the inside of 
their barrels were bored out smooth. 
These would not shoot a ball very 
far nor very straight, and in time it 
was found out that guns could be 
made to shoot truer and further if 
little channels or grooves were cut 
on the inside of the barrels. Guns 
whose bores are cut with these 
grooves are called rifles. The 
grooves, which differ in different 
kinds of rifles in shape, size, and 
number, do not run straight from 
one end of the barrel to the other, 
but are made with a twist, so that 
they usually turn round the barrel 
once in its length. When the gun is 
fired the ball has to follow the grooves 
in passing out of the barrel, and this 
gives it a twist which makes it turn 
round very fast after coming out of 
the barrel, and always in the same 
way. In the smooth-bore gun the 





RIFLE 


5 i 3 


RIFLE 


round bullet used in it would also 
turn round sometimes ; but the mo¬ 
tion was not always the same, and 
this was apt to throw it out of its 
right line of flight ; but the rifle ball, 
being made to turn exactly in the 
same way all the time, goes much 
truer and straighten As it is com¬ 
monly made pointed like a cone, it 
also cuts through the air easier, and 
therefore goes much farther. 

Both small arms and cannon are 
now grooved, or rifled as it is called, 
and both kinds are alike called 
rifles, the different kinds of each 
being known generally by the names 
of their inventors or those who first 
made them ; but cannon were not 
called rifles before the present cen¬ 
tury. The rifling of small arms has 
been done for more than three hun • 
dred years, but rifles did not take 
the place of muskets in war until 
late years. 

Breech-loaders. Both cannon and 
small arms were made to load at the 
breech, that is, at the back end, 
several hundred years ago, but they 
were not very well made, and did 
not come into general use. During 
the past twenty-five years great im¬ 
provements have been made in them, 
and now every principal nation in 
the world uses some kind of a 
breech-loading rifle. The musket 
was loaded at the muzzle, that is, at 
the mouth. The cartridge, which 
was made of tough paper called car¬ 
tridge paper, had in one end the 
powder and at the other end the 
ball. When the soldier wished to 
load his gun, he bit off part of the 
paper at one end, so as to uncover 
the powder, and then put the car¬ 
tridge into the muzzle of the gun. 
He then drew the ramrod out of its 
place, put it into the barrel, and 
rammed down the cartridge to the 
bottom. The hammer of the lock 
was next drawn back and the per¬ 
cussion cap put on the nipple, and 
the musket was ready to be fired. 
Although soldiers were taught to do 
these things quickly, yet much time 


was spent in loading, and not more 
than two shots could be fired in a 
minute, while with some breech¬ 
loaders fifteen to twenty shots can 
be fired in the same time. 

Breech-loading guns need no ram¬ 
rod, the cartridge being put into its 
place at the back end of the barrel 
generally with the fingers. The car¬ 
tridge case, commonly called the 
“ shell,” in which are put the ball, 
the powder, and the percussion or 
fulminating powder by which it is 
fired, is usually made of a thin brass 
tube, open only at one end. 

The picture shows the kind of car¬ 
tridge fired in the Springfield rifle, 
the gun now used in the United 
States army. In this, a a is the 
brass shell, b the ball, c the powder, 
and d the percussion powder. The 
shell is water-tight, so that the car¬ 
tridge may be soaked in water with¬ 
out wetting the powder. All the 



” a ^ 

Springfield Rifle Cartridge. 


soldier has to do in loading his gun 
is to open the back end, push in the 
cartridge, and shut it again, when it 
is ready to be fired. When the trig¬ 
ger is pulled the hammer strikes a 
little steel pin which is driven against 
the end of the cartridge where the 
percussion powder is, and this fires 
it. In opening the back end, the 
brass shell which held the powder 
and ball is thrown out, and the gun 
is then ready for another cartridge. 

The rifle used in the United States 
navy is the Remington, in which 
the cartridge is much like that used 
in the Springfield rifle. The Rem¬ 
ington is used also in the armies 
of Spain, Sweden, Denmark, and 
Egypt. Different kinds of breech¬ 
loaders are used in other European 
countries, but they all have brass 
cartridges, the German and French 
needle-guns, in which the cartridge 








ROBIN 


514 


ROCKS 


cases were first made of papier- 
mache, having been changed. 
These rifles are called needle-guns 
because they are fired by a steel 
needle which is pushed into the 
cartridge by a strong spring when 
the trigger is pulled, and this fires 
the percussion powder. In the Spen¬ 
cer rifle, an American gun, seven 
cartridges are carried in a hollow 
place in the stock or butt end, 
and can be pushed up into the bar¬ 
rel one at a time by moving the 
guard of the trigger—that is, the flat 
band below the trigger—and thus 
fired very fast. This rifle was much 
used by the United States cavalry in 
the civil war, but the Sharp rifle has 
now mostly taken its place. This, 
like the Springfield rifle, is made for 
only one cartridge at a time. The 
Winchester rifle has seventeen cart¬ 
ridges in a tube under the barrel, 
and a new rifle made by the Rem¬ 
ingtons carries in it ten cartridges. 
Many rifles were made in this coun¬ 
try for Turkey during the late war 
with Russia. Part of these were 
Winchester rifles, but most of them 
were called the Peabody-Martini- 
Henry gun, because they were made 
up of parts of three different kinds 
of rifles bearing those names. The 
Martini-Henry rifle is English and is 
used in the British army, but the 
Peabody is an American rifle. An¬ 
other American rifle, called the Ber¬ 
dan, is used in Russia, and Ameri¬ 
can rifles of different kinds are used 
in almost all the South American 
countries. 

The word rifle is from the Ger¬ 
man riffeln , to cut a groove. 

ROACH. See Dace. 

ROBIN. The robin redbreast 
lives in the mild parts of Europe, 
and in western Asia and north Af¬ 
rica. Its back is olive green, and its 
neck and breast light red. It has a 
sweet song, and loves to build its 
nests near dwellings, often putting 
them where there is great noise and 
confusion. This is the robin red¬ 
breast of poetry and song, the little 


bird which covered the “babes in 
the wood ’ ’ with leaves. 

The American Robin is really a 
thrush, and is about twice as large 
as the robin of Europe. It is usually 
olive gray on the back, white on 
the throat, and red on the breast. It 
is found all over North America. It 
comes north very early in the spring, 
and is sometimes seen in New Eng¬ 
land before the snow has left the 
ground. Its habits are very famil¬ 
iar, much like those of the English 
robin, and it was probably on this 
account that it was named after it 
by the early settlers. Its native song 
is not so sweet as that of its name¬ 
sake, but it can be taught to imitate 
other birds and even to sing tunes. 
It builds its nest usually in trees 
near houses, lays four to six pale 
green eggs, and raises two broods 
each season. 

The robin belongs to the order 
znsessores, or perching BIRDS. 

The word robin is a short form of 
Robert, which is from the Old Ger¬ 
man hrod, fame, and briht, bright, 
fame-bright, a name given to the 
heathen god Thor, to whom the 
robin was sacred. 

ROCKS. When we speak of a 
rock, in common language, we mean 
a hard stone, but any kind of natural 
stone, whether it be hard or soft, is 
really a rock. In this sense, sand, 
clay, peat, and coal are as much 
rocks as sandstone or granite. 
There are a great many kinds of 
rocks, but they may all be divided 
into three classes : r, Sedimentary 
Rocks ; 2, Organic Rocks ; and 3, 
Igneous Rocks. 

1. Sedimentary Rocks are those 
which are formed out of sediments 
(Latin sediment a , settlings). Sedi¬ 
ment is something which has been 
mixed up with or moved along by 
water, and has finally settled to the 
bottom. If gravel be shaken up in 
a glass with water and then left to 
stand, it will at once sink to the bot¬ 
tom and form a sediment of gravel. 
If sand be shaken up in the same 





ROCKS 


515 


ROCKS 


way, it will take longer to settle, but 
in a few minutes the water will be¬ 
come clear and a sediment of sand 
will be formed on the bottom. If 
mud be shaken up until thoroughly 
mixed with the water, it will remain 
dirty for some hours ; but the clay 
will settle little by little, and at last 
a sediment of mud will be formed at 
the bottom. 

Gravel, sand, and mud are all 
made in the same way and from the 
same things. They differ only in 
coarseness : gravel is made up of 
stones worn round and smooth ; in 
sand they are worn into grains ; and 
in mud they are worn into fine dust. 
They all come from pieces of stone 
broken off from the cliffs of moun¬ 
tains and hills by the rains, springs, 
and frost, and washed down by 
streams and rivers. When the 
pieces first fall from their places they 
are not round but have sharp edges ; 
but as the brooks sweep them along 
they lose their sharpness little by 
little by being rubbed against each 
other until at last they become 
rounded like cobble stones and 
gravel. As the stones grow rounder 
they grow smaller, and many of 
them are ground down into mere 
sand and fine dust:. You will find 
plenty of rounded stones in the bed 
of every brook. As brooks and riv¬ 
ers are always flowing they are all 
the time grinding rocks into gravel, 
sand, and mud, and all the time car¬ 
rying them down into the lowlands 
and thence into lakes and the sea. 
We say commonly that these things 
are worn by the water, but they 
really wear themselves down ; all 
the water does is to keep them grind¬ 
ing against each other. 

When water flows quickly it 
sweeps along both gravel and sand, 
but when it begins to flow slower it 
drops some of its load. The heav¬ 
iest sinks to the bottom first and 
forms a layer on the bottom, then 
the next heaviest makes another 
layer, and lastly the light mud set¬ 
tles on the top. In some places 


many sets of layers are thus made 
one above another, sometimes to the 
depth of hundreds and thousands 
of feet. When gravel, sand, and 
mud are thus piled up in layers 
above each other in the beds of lakes 
and the ocean, the layers which are 
at the bottom are under a great 
weight and are squeezed into a much 
firmer mass than those above, thus 
becoming quite hard. The water of 
brooks and rivers also carries down 
with it a good deal of lime, iron, and 
other things dissolved in it, and 
these things become mixed with the 
sand and other materials and ce¬ 
ment them togther, so that they are 
made into a solid mass. The hard¬ 
ening of sediment into stone in this 
way is called infiltration, because 
the substance which binds the grains 
together filters through them. 
Thus, the gravel, sand, and mud 
swept into lakes and the sea by riv¬ 
ers is made into rock in two ways, 
by pressure, and by infiltration. 
Rock made out of gravel hardened 
or cemented together is called con¬ 
glomerate (Latin conglomeration, 
rolled together) ; it is also some¬ 
times called pudding stone, because 
it looks like pudding with plums in 
it. Rock made from sand is called 
sandstone ; and that from mud, 
shale (German schale, shell, from 
schalen , to peel or shell off), because 
it is in leaves or layers which easily 
scale off. 

Now let us look at the side of a 
hill cut through from top to bottom, 
as shown in the picture, so that we 
can see the layers of rock in it. 
Such a cutting is called a section 
(Latin sectio, a cutting), and each 
layer in it is called a stratum (Latin 
stratum, plural strata, a bed or 
layer). All sedimentary rocks lie in 
strata, and they are therefore often 
called stratified rocks. In the pic¬ 
ture, a shows a stratum of conglom¬ 
erate ; b, b, b strata of sandstone ; 
and c, c, strata of shale. It will be 
seen that they are not in regular 
order, but that they lie just as the 





ROCKS 


ROCKS 


516 


gravel, sand, and mud of which they 
are made may have been washed in. 
In this case, the stratum at the bot¬ 
tom and the one at the top look to 
be the same, and they are really the 
same, only the one at the bottom is 
much older than the other. The 
strata are not always so easy to see 



Section of Hill, showing Strata. 


as they are in the picture, for the 
rocks are often hidden by soil or 
otherwise so that it is hard to tell one 
from the other. 

Sedimentary or stratified rocks 
oflen have other things in them be¬ 
sides gravel, sand, and mud, among 
which the most important are the 
remains of plants and animals. 
Pieces of ferns and other plants are 
found bedded in these rocks, espe¬ 
cially in sandstones and shales, which 
have been swept down with sand and 
mud by rivers and buried up in 
the layers. As the sediment hard¬ 
ened into shale these plants changed 
under the great pressure little by lit¬ 
tle until they finally became coal. In 
the same way the remains of shells, 
corals, fishes, and other animals 
have become buried in the sediment 
and hardened into rock. All such 
remains of plants and animals bed¬ 
ded in rocks are called fossils (from 
Latin fossum , dug, because they are 
usually dug out of the earth). By 
looking at the fossils in rocks we 
can tell whether the rocks were made 
in the sea or in lakes, because the 


plants and animals found in salt and 
in fresh water differ from each other. 
Most of our rocks have been made 
under the sea, and afterward raised 
up out of the water. 

2. Organic Rocks are formed out 
of the remains of plants and animals. 
It has been shown how parts of 
plants and animals become mixed 
up in sedimentary or stratified rocks ; 
but plants and animals sometimes 
form thick layers by themselves, 
which also turn into rocks. As 
these are not formed in the same 
way as sedimentary rocks, they are 
not classed with them, but are put 
into another class called organic 
rocks, which means rocks made up 
of organisms, or things which have 
had organs. Plants and animals 
live, move, and grow by means of 
organs ; hence, when we speak of 
organic remains we mean fossils, or 
the remains of plants and animals. 

Coal is an organic rock because 
it is made up of the remains of 
plants. It is found in strata, like 
sandstone and shale, among beds 
of sedimentary rock, and usually 
only a few feet thick. A section cut 
through a bed of coal and the rocks 
above and below it would look some- 





Section of Coal Bed. 

thing like the picture. In this c is 
the layer or seam of coal, as it is 
called ; b is a layer of hard clay or 
shale on which it lies, called there¬ 
fore the pavement of the coal; and 
a is a layer of sandstones, shales, 
etc., under it ; d shows layers of 
sandstones and shales, forming 


















ROCKS 


5i7 


ROCKS 


what is called the roof of the coal. 
Almost every seam of coal lies on a 
bed of clay like this. It is made up 
of dark clay, with black streaks and 
branches running down through it 
like the roots of plants. This is 
what Ihey really are, and the bed of 
clay is merely an old soil, which 
used to be the top of the ground, 
and the bed of coal is made up of 
the plants which once grew on it. 
Each coal seam therefore has been 
in some past time a thick mass of 
vegetation growing on a marshy 
plain, something like the jungles in 
hot countries. These plains had a 
muddy soil, and it is this which now 
forms the pavement under the coal 
seam. The leaves and stems of 
these plants have been so squeezed 



Plants from which 

stems, and leaves of the plants 
which grew in it. 

Rocks are formed out of the or¬ 
ganic remains of animals as w r ell as 
of plants. The bottoms of many 
lakes are covered with a kind of 
chalky mud called marl, made up of 
the decayed and decaying shells of 
animals which lived in it. Some¬ 
times the beds of dried-up lakes are 
dug up to get the marl to use as a 
manure on land, and these layers of 
decayed shells have been found 
many feet thick. But on the great 
bed of the ocean these beds of 
shells are hundreds and even thou¬ 
sands of feet thick. As sea animals 
die their shells and bones gather on 
the bottom and make a layer which 


together that we can seldom find any 
of them in the coal itself, but parts 
of them are often found beautifully 
preserved in the layers of shale and 
sandstone above and below the 
coal. A few of the plants out of 
which coal was made are shown 
in the pictures. These grew and 
died long before any of the plants 
which now live on the earth were 
known. 

Peat is formed in much the same 
way with coal ; indeed, if left long 
enough it would become coal. If a 
peat bog be cut through, on the 
bottom will be found a layer of 
clay, which once formed the bed of 
a lake, and above this lies the peat, 
made up of the vegetable matter 
formed from the decayed roots, 



oal has been made. 

is all the time growing thicker and 
thicker. Some of this has been 
brought up from the bottom of the 
ocean by means of DREDGES ; when 
looked at under the microscope it is 
seen to be made up mostly of small 
shells called foraminifera, some of 
which are whole and some broken. 
If now we look at a piece of chalk in 
the same way we shall see that it is 
made up of just the same things, and 
we therefore know that it is a stone 
made out of the remains of once-liv¬ 
ing animals, and that it has been 
formed under the sea. Not only 
chalk, but almost all the rocks called 
limestones were formed in the same 
way. As great ranges of hills and 
cliffs hundreds of feet high in differ- 











ROCKS 


518 


ROCKS 


ent parts of the world are made up 
wholly of chalk, and as some of the 
highest mountain chains, such as 
parts of the Alps and the Himalayas, 
are made up of limestones, we are 
led to wonder how these masses 
were raised from the bottom of the 
sea and pushed so high up above 
the surface of the land. We shall 
find out how this came about by 
studying the third class of rocks. 

3. Igneous Rocks are those which 
have been melted within the earth or 
have been thrown up by volcanoes. 
Igneous (Latin ignis , fire) means 
fiery, and igneous rocks are so 
called because they have been 
formed chiefly by the action of fire 
inside the earth, which is told about 
in the article Earth. Igneous 
rocks may be divided into two 
groups : the crystalline and the frag¬ 
mental. 

Crystalline igneous rocks are made 
up of cyrstals which have once been 
melted. It is told above that plants 
and animals are called organic, be¬ 
cause they live and move by means 
of their organs. Mineral substances 
have no organs, and are therefore 
called inorganic substances. When 
any inorganic substance becomes 
solid, it forms crystals. For ex¬ 
ample, ice, which is water become 
solid, is merely a mass of crystals. 
Indeed, the Greek word crystal 
{krustallos) means ice ; but we use 
it to mean the form taken by any 
kind of mineral matter in becoming 
solid. Thus, lava, granite, quartz, 
iron, limestone, the diamond, and 
all the solid materials of the globe 
are made up of crystals. But when 
we speak of crystalline rocks, we 
usually mean those whose crystals 
were formed by the action of fire. 
Granite is a good example of crys¬ 
talline igneous rock. It is made up 
of three different substances, in each 
of which the crystals are of different 
form. The crystals of feldspar are 
long and smooth-faced and of a pale 
flesh color or dull white, those of 
mica in bright thin plates, and those 


of quartz in little grains, hard, clear, 
and glassy. All these are mixed to¬ 
gether without any order through 
the whole stone. There are many 
high mountains formed almost en¬ 
tirely of granite, yet we have reason 
to believe that it was melted and 
cooled into crystals deep down in the 
earth under other rocks. How it 
came up to the surface of the earth 
and was piled up above it in great 
mountains is told about on page 520. 
There are many other kinds of crys¬ 
talline igneous rocks, most of which 
were thrown out from volcanoes in 
the form of lava, and hardened into 
crystals on the surface of the earth. 
Basalt, one of these, is often found 
in regular columns, like those in 
the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. 
These were formed by the contrac¬ 
tion or drawing together of the 
melted lava in cooling. 

Fragmental igneous rocks are 
made up of fragments, such as bits 
of lava and other rocks, ashes, and 
dust, which have been thrown out 
from volcanoes. These become 
packed together closely and form the 
rock called tufa. In some places 
tufa is found in masses many hun¬ 
dred feet thick, and in the layers are 
often seen shells and other sea fos¬ 
sils, which show that the materials 
of which the tufa was made fell into 
the sea and there became cemented 
into rock. 

We have thus shown that the 
rocks on the earth may be divided 
into three classes : Sedimentary 
rocks, formed by the settlings of 
gravel, sand, and mud, mostly on 
the bottom of the sea; Organic 
rocks, made up of masses of animal 
and vegetable matter ; and Igneous 
rocks, formed by the action of fire 
inside of the earth. The whole top 
of the earth is made up of these 
three classes of rocks. How far be¬ 
low the surface they go we cannot 
tell, but we find the same kinds of 
rocks as far down as we are able to 
dig. This solid rocky top of the 
earth is called the earth’s crust, a 








ROCKS 


5i9 


ROCKS 


name which was given to it when it 
was thought that the globe was made 
up of a hot liquid mass inside, with a 
rather thin cool crust over it. We 
do not yet know whether the main 
part of the inside of the earth is 
liquid or solid, but it is generally be¬ 
lieved that at some past time, mil¬ 
lions of years ago, our globe was a 
burning mass much like the sun, of 
which it once formed a part, and 
that it has been cooling little by lit¬ 
tle through all that time. The crust 
has thus become cool and solid, but 
the inner part still keeps a good 
deal of heat. You may think that 
if the inside is so hot, the out¬ 
side ought to be warmer than it is ; 
but rocks are bad conductors of 


heat, and so the great heat of the 
inside passes off very slowly. 

It has been told in Heat that al¬ 
most all bodies swell when they are 
heated and shrink when they are 
cooled. When the earth was very 
hot, therefore, it must have been 
much larger than it is now, and it 
must have shrunk a good deal while 
cooling. This must have caused a 
great strain on the crust, so that 
some parts of it became ridged and 
others sunken, like the shrivelled 
skin of a dried apple. Changes 
somewhat like this have been always 
going on, and are still going on in 
different parts of the world through 
the action of volcanoes and earth¬ 
quakes, so that in some places the 



Fault, showing Igneous Rocks, I I, forced into Cracks between 
Sedimentary Rocks, A, B, C. 


land is rising little by little, while in 
others it is slowly sinking below the 
sea. Thus it has happened that sed¬ 
imentary rocks formed at the bot¬ 
tom of the sea have been raised up 
so as to make great mountains, and 
that organic rocks, made by the 
decay of vegetable matter on the sur¬ 
face of the earth, or by the packing 
together of shells and other animal 
matter on the bottom of the sea, 
have been forced out of their places, 
so that some, like coal, are buried 
deep down in the earth, and others, 
like chalk and limestone, are raised 
high above the surface of the land. 

But other changes have also taken 
place. The rocks have not only 


been lifted up and sunk down ; they 
have also in many places been crum¬ 
pled up and broken. Hence the 
crust of the earth, instead of being 
in flat layers, as it would have been 
if the rocks had been left as they 
were made, has been so squeezed and 
broken that the oldest rocks often lie 
higher than those which were made 
last. Thus it happens that the strat¬ 
ified rocks are seldom found in level 
layers, but generally lie slanting, and 
sometimes so tilted up as to stand 
on end. Sometimes too the strata 
are all crumpled and folded together, 
and sometimes they are broken in two 
and those on one side of the crack 
are shoved up much higher than 









ROPE 


520 


ROPE 


those on the other, so as to make a 
break in the layers. Such a break is 
called a fault. This often happens 
in coal seams, and gives miners much 
trouble. When strata are thus 
broken, melted igneous rocks have 
often been forced up from under¬ 
neath so as to fill up the crack, and 
thus granite and other igneous rocks 
are often found in veins between 
other kinds of rocks. In the picture 
two such veins of igneous rocks are 
shown at I, which have been forced 
in between stratified rocks so that 
they have been broken into three 
parts, A, B, and C. In two places 
the igneous rocks have risen to the 
surface of the earth and formed 
hills and mountains. 

So well have most of these rocks 
preserved their story, that we can 
tell a good deal about the history of 
the earth by looking at them. We 
know the order in which the differ¬ 
ent kinds were formed, so that we 
can tell where each one belongs, not¬ 
withstanding that they are now mixed 
up together, or that the oldest kind 
may be piled on top of the newest. 
The fossils in rocks, too, tell much 
of their history, for the plants and 
animals in the early ages of the 
earth were much different from those 
of to-day. Each division of rocks, 
therefore, has its own kind of fos¬ 
sils, and this is of great help to us in 
separating the divisions from each 
other. 

The science which tells about how 
the earth has been formed and the 
rocks of which it is made up is called 
geology (Greek ge , the earth, and 
logos , a discourse or talk), which 
means a talk about the earth. 

The word rock is found in many 
languages : in French it is roc or 
roche } in Spanish rueca , Portuguese 
roca, in Italian rocca , in Danish 
rok , Swedish rock , and Icelandic 
rockr. 

ROPE, a large, stout, twisted 
cord, usually more than one inch 
round. When smaller than this, it 
is called a cord. Ropes are usually 


made in a rope-walk, a long, nar¬ 
row, one-story building, one end of 
which is called the head and the 
other end the foot. At the head is 
a spinning-machine, a large wheel 
between two posts, which turns by 



means of a belt, a , a number of lit¬ 
tle rollers, b, b, ending in small 
hooks, c, c. The second picture 
shows one of these enlarged. 
When the wheel is turned, these 
hooks, which are called whirls, turn 
round very rapidly. There are gen¬ 
erally about twelve whirls in a spin¬ 
ning-machine, so that twelve spin¬ 
ners can spin at once. 

Each spinner wraps loosely 
round his body a bunch of UL 
hemp, pulls out a few (jF|| 
threads and fastens them to II II 
one of the whirls or hooks JrJJI 
of the spinning-wheel, vTp 
which is turned by an as¬ 
sistant, and walks slowly 
backward down the rope- 
walk, letting the threads 
draw out little by little and 
evenly through his fingers. Whirl. 
The turning of the whirl 
keeps the thread twisting all the 
time, and the spinner keeps on thus 
until he gets to the foot of the 
walk. As he goes along he hangs 
















ROSE 


521 


ROSEMARY 


the thread, which is called a yarn, 
on hooks on the cross-beams, so 
that it shall not fall on the ground. 
When the yarn is done, it is wound 
up on a reel, and the spinner spins 
another one. 

After spinning the yarns, the next 
thing is warping, in which enough 
yarns for a rope are stretched out 
to an equal length. If they are to 
be made into tarred rope, they are 
drawn through a kettle of hot tar, 
and afterward through a hole which 
scrapes off the tar where there is too 
much of it. Several yarns, usually 
three, are now fastened to a whirl- 
hook and twisted together, but in 
the opposite way from that in which 
they were first twisted. This is 
called laying, and the cord thus 
made, a strand. When three such 
strands are twisted together it is 
called the first lay, and the rope 
made is called a hawser-laid rope ; 
and when four strands are used, it 
is called the second lay, and the 
rope is said to be shroud hawser-laid. 
The third lay is the twisting to¬ 
gether of three hawser-laid ropes, 
when it is said to be cable-laid. 
This makes the largest kind of rope, 
called a cable, used for mooring and 
anchoring ships ; but chain-cables 
have now almost altogether taken 
their place. 

Ropes are now largely made by 
machinery, by which they are spun 
much more evenly than by hand. 
Ropes of iron wires twisted to¬ 
gether are much used for the rig¬ 
ging of ships, and for cables for sus¬ 
pension bridges. They are much 
stronger than those made of hemp. 

The word rope is from the Anglo- 
Saxon rap , rope. 

ROSE. It is not known from 
what country the rose first came, 
but it has been common from the 
most ancient times. There are a 
great many kinds of roses, and 
some are among the most beautiful 
of flowers. There are several wild 
kinds in the United States, among 
which are the prairie or Michi¬ 


gan rose, blooming in July, from 
which some of the cultivated double 
pink roses have descended ; the 
dwarf rose, which blooms from 
May to July ; the swamp rose, found 
usually in damp ground, and which 
blooms from June to September; 
and the early wild rose. The Cher¬ 
okee rose, much used in the South¬ 
ern States to make hedges, was 
brought to this country from China 
before the Revolution. Among the 
cultivated roses, the red French or 
Provence rose, commonly called the 
summer or June rose, was brought 
from Syria to France in the time of 
the Crusades. The cabbage rose 
was first brought from the Caucasus 
Mountains, and the damask rose 
from Damascus. The moss rose 
was first carried to England from 
Holland in 1596. The yellow 
rose came from Persia, and the 
musk rose from Persia, China, or 
India. The rose is chiefly valua¬ 
ble for the perfumes made from it. 
The otto, ottar, or attar of roses 
(so called from an Arabic word 
meaning to smell sweetly) is an oil 
distilled (see Alcohol) from the 
petals or flower leaves of roses. It 
is made chiefly in India and Euro¬ 
pean Turkey, but some is made in 
the south of France. It is very 
costly, as it takes 4000 pounds of 
rose leaves to make one pound of 
attar of rose. What is left after the 
attar is distilled is made into rose 
water. Damask and musk roses are 
chiefly used in making attar. 

The word rose is from the Latin 
rosa, Greek rhodon , rose. 

ROSEMARY, a sweet-smelling 
shrub which grows wild along the 
coast of the Mediterranean. An 
essential oil is distilled (see Al¬ 
cohol) from it, which is used in 
perfumery, and in medicine to give 
a pleasant odor to liniments ana lo¬ 
tions. 

The word rosemary is in Old Eng¬ 
lish rosemarine , and is from the 
Latin rosmarinus, rosemary, from 
ros, dew, and mare, the sea. It is 






ROSEWOOD 


522 


ROW-BOAT 


so called because it grows best near 
the sea. 

ROSEWOOD, the wood of several 
kinds of trees, which has an agree¬ 
able smell much like that of roses, 
especially when sawn or cut. It is 
usually dark red, beautifully veined 
with brownish-black or dark-red 
shades and stripes, and is much used 
for ornamental furniture and cabinet 
work. It is very costly, and is 
chiefly used as a veneering or thin 
covering for other woods. The 
finest rosewood comes from South 
America, especially from Brazil, but 
some is brought from Jamaica, and 
some also from the East Indies. 

ROW-BOAT, a boat moved by 
means of oars. Row-boats differ 
much in form and size according to 
the uses to which they are to be 
put, and are given various names. 
The principal row-boats on a ship of 
war are called the launch, barge, 
gig, pinnace, cutter, jolly-boat, and 
yawl. The launch is a large flat- 
bottomed boat, used mostly to car¬ 
ry wood, water, and other heavy 
things from the shore to the ship. 
The barge is a long, narrow boat 
used by the principal officers in 
going to and from shore, and usually 
has eight oars. The gig is a long, 
light boat, rowed by six or eight 
oars, used for going long distances. 
The pinnace is used by the lower 
officers, and has usually eight oars. 
The cutter is rowed with six oars, 
and is used by the crew and for car¬ 
rying light stores. The jolly-boat is 
much like the cutter, but smaller, 
and has only four oars. The yawl 
is a wide, short boat, rowed by 
four or six oars. Among other 
kinds of row-boats are wherries, 
skiffs, punts, canoes, and dories. 
The wherry is a light, long, and nar¬ 
row boat, sharp at both ends, and 
used generally by only one person 
for fast rowing. A skiff is a short, 
light boat, rowed by one or two 
persons. A punt is a shallow flat- 
bottomed boat, used for duck-shoot¬ 
ing, etc. A canoe is a long narrow 


boat, made usually out of a log or 
of the bark of a tree ; when made 
out of a log it is sometimes called a 
dugout. A canoe is also sometimes 
called a dory, but a dory is com¬ 
monly flat-bottomed. A whale¬ 
boat is a long, deep boat, sharp at 
both ends, and rowed with five or 
seven oars. In boat building, a boat 
is said to be carvel-built when the 
planks on her bottom and sides are 
put on flush or smooth, that is, with 
the edge of one plank resting on the 
edge of the next one ; and clinch¬ 
er built, or lap-streaked, when the 
planks overlap each other like clap¬ 
boards on a house. Sailors usually 
call the seats of a boat thwarts, be¬ 
cause they are athwart or across the 
boat. The gunwale, or gunnel, is the 
board on the upper edge of the boat ; 
the rowlocks, or places for holding 
the oars while rowing, are some¬ 
times hollows cut in the gunwale, 
sometimes a pair of pins, called 
thole-pins, between which the oar 
rests, and sometimes of a single pin, 
to which the oar is fastened. Boats 
are rowed by either oars or sculls. 
Oars are usually longer and heavier 
than sculls, and each one is used by 
one man, who takes hold of it with 
both hands ; but in rowing with 
sculls, two are used by each man, 
one being held in each hand. Sweeps 
are very long and heavy oars used 
for rowing large vessels in calms, 
each one being worked by several 
men. 

Racing Row-boats are very differ¬ 
ent from common row-boats, being 
very long and narrow, and made so 
light that they can easily be carried 
by their crews. They are so very 
thin that they are called “shells.” 
They are made of various sizes, and 
are usually named from the number 
of pairs of sculls or of oars used in 
them. A single shell is rowed by 
one man with one pair of sculls, and 
a double shell by two men, each 
using a pair of sculls. Four-oared, 
s'ix-oared, and eight-oared shells are 
rowed by four, six, and eight men, 




RUBY 


523 


RYE 


each using a single oar. Shells are 
made usually of a light wooden frame 
covered with a thin plank, called the 
skin, made of cedar, mahogany, or 
pine. The skin is sometimes no 
thicker than the cover of a cigar box, 
and great care has to be taken lest 
it be split or twisted out of shape. 
Instead of wood the skin is often 
made of paper formed by pasting 
sheets on a pine model, which is 
taken out when the skin is dry. The 
skin is then made water-proof, and 
has a frame put into it to keep it in 
shape. The boat is open only in 
the middle, where the rowers sit, 
and around this is a board called the 
washboard, made to keep the water 
out. The two ends of the boat, be¬ 
fore and behind where the rowers 
sit, are covered usually with oiled 
linen or silk, but sometimes with 
thin wood. The rowlocks of a rac¬ 
ing boat are not made like those in 
a common row-boat, but are put a 
good way out from the side of the 
boat, on strong iron rods called out- 
riggers. This is done because if the 
rowlocks were on the gunwale of so 
narrow a boat, the oarsmen would 
scarcely be able to pull at all. In 
rowing, the oarsmen sit with their 
backs to the bow of the boat, and 
the steering is usually done by the 
man in the bow, who works the rud¬ 
der with his feet by means of long 
wires which run along the bottom 
of the boat. The oars of racing 
boats are not made with flat blades, 
like those of common boats, but are 
hollowed out so as to take hold of 
the water better. They are common¬ 
ly called scoop or spoon oars. 

The word row-boat is from the 
Anglo-Saxon rowan , to row, and 
bdt, boat. 

RUBY, a beautiful red precious 
STONE. Some rubies are rose-color, 
and some are so dark as to be 
nearly violet or brown. The orien¬ 
tal ruby, the most valuable kind, 
fine specimens being worth much 
more than the diamond, is of the 
shade of red called “pigeon’s 


blood.’’ The finest ones are brought 
from Ceylon and Burmah. The 
ruby mines of Burmah belong to the 
crown, and one of the king’s titles 
is “ lord of the rubies.’’ 

The word ruby is from the Latin 
ruber , red. 

RUM, a liquor distilled (see Al¬ 
cohol) from the skimmings of 
sugar pans in making sugar, from 
sugar cane juice, or from molasses. 
It is largely made in the West In¬ 
dies, particularly in the islands of 
Santa Cruz and Jamaica. Some is 
also made in the United States, 
chiefly in New England, from which 
it is called New England rum. A 
kind made in Massachusetts is called 
Medford rum. New England rum 
is distilled mostly from molasses. 
Pure rum is generally light colored, 
but Jamaica rum is colored reddish 
brown with caramel (see Sugar). 
Rum is sometimes flavored with the 
fruit of the guava tree, and some¬ 
times with PINEAPPLE. 

The word rum is said to be West 
Indian. 

RUSH, the common name of a 
great number of plants, which look 
much like the grasses, but 
which are more like the 
lilies. Rushes grow usually 
in wet places ; tufts of them 
may often be seen in 
swamps and in wet pas¬ 
tures. In former times, 
before carpets came into 
use, the floors of houses 
were strewn with rushes; 
and candles were made 
with the pith of rushes for 
wicks. The bottoms of 
chairs are sometimes 
woven of them, and they 
are also used for weaving 
mats and small baskets. 

The word rush is from 
the Anglo-Saxon rise, from 
hriscian, to make a rust- 
ling noise and the rush Headof 
was so called from its sound R ye 
when moved by wind. 

RYE, the plant and grain of one 






RYE 


524 


RYE 


of the cereal (see Corn) grasses. It 
looks much like wheat, but its ears, 
as will be seen in the picture, are 
bearded like those of barley, though 
the beard is not quite so long. The 
grain is brown, and is harder and 
rather coarser than that of wheat. 
Bread made from it is very dark, and 
is not so good for food as that made 
from wheat, but it is largely used in 
the countries around the Baltic Sea. 
In Sweden, the common people 
live largely upon rye cakes, which 
are baked but twice a year, and are 
therefore so hard that they have to 


be cut with a hatchet or saw. In 
New England, rye flour is used with 
Indian meal in making brown bread. 
Much whisky is made from rye in 
this country, in Holland it is used 
with barley for making gin, and in 
Russia a liquor called quass is distilled 
(see Alcohol) from it. The straw of 
rye is tough and not good food for 
cattle, but is used for making STRAW 
hats, for stuffing beds, horse-collars, 
and other things, and for thatching 
the roofs of buildings. 

The word rye is from the Anglo- 
Saxon rige , rye. 




s 


SABLE. This little animal, so 
much prized for its fur, is found 
mostly in the wilds of Siberia, and 
in the cold mountains between Eu¬ 
ropean and Asiatic Russia. It is 
much like the weasel (see picture 
on page 378) in shape and size. Its 
fur in summer is brownish, with gray 
spots on the head and neck, but in 
winter it is a deep rich brown. The 
sable spends most of the day in trees, 
and hunts by night, living chiefly on 
hares and other small game. Many 
of the Russian exiles employ them¬ 
selves in hunting the sable, and as 
it lives in the coldest and most rug¬ 
ged places, they suffer much from 
cold, hunger, and wild beasts. The 
winter fur is the most valued, and 
brings very high prices, single skins 
often selling for $50 to $75. The 
animal has been hunted so much 
that it is getting scarce, and the fur 
has increased much in value in the 
past two or three years. Sable fur 
is much worn by ladies, and as lin¬ 
ings for the robes of high officials in 
Europe, and the tails are made into 
artists’ pencils and brushes. The 
American or Hudson bay sable is 
the pine marten. 

The sable is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the weasel family. 

The word sable is from the new 
Latin sabellinus or zibellinus, sable. 

SADDLE, a seat to be put on a 
horse’s back for a rider to sit upon. 
The tree of a saddle is a frame of 
wood and iron, made to fit a horse’s 
back so that it does not rest on the 
backbone but presses on the back 


each side of it. Some trees are 
nearly flat on top, and some are 
raised up high both in front and be¬ 
hind, but the most common saddle 
is like the one in the picture. In 
this the tree is raised a little in front 
to form the pommel c, and behind 
also in a rounded ridge d, which is 
called the cantel. The seat of the 
saddle, a , is made by stretching 
tightly over the tree a tanned pig¬ 



skin, which is very tough and wears 
well. The flaps, b, are also made 
of pig-skin. The stirrup leathers, e , 
which hold the stirrups, /, are fast¬ 
ened to the tree under the seat, and 
fall over the flaps. Under the saddle 
are false flaps, padded so as not 
to hurt the horse’s back, and be¬ 
tween the flaps and the false flaps 
lie the girths, g, which are buckled 
to straps fastened to the tree. When 


525 













SADDLE 


526 


SAFFLOWER 


the saddle is put upon the horse, 
the girths are passed under the 
belly and buckled tightly to straps 
under the other flap. 

Side Saddles, used by women, are 
made in nearly the same way, but 
have only one stirrup in which the 
left foot is placed. On the pommel 



Queen Elizabeth’s Saddle. 


of the saddle are two pieces called 
horns, between which the right knee 
is put. Sometimes a third horn, 
called the hunting horn, is put on 
the side, under which the left knee is 
placed. This gives the rider almost 
as firm a seat as can be got in the 
man’s saddle. In old times women’s 
saddles were made without horns, 
but with a high pommel to hold on 
to. The second picture shows the 
side saddle of Queen Elizabeth, 
which is still to be seen at Horsham 
Hall, Essex, England. The seat is 
a velvet cushion, and the pommel is 
of metal gilded. In the third pic- 



Icelandic Side Saddle. 


ture is shown a kind of side saddle 
used by women in Iceland. It has 
a seat with a back, like a common 
chair, and has instead of a stirrup a 
little shelf on which both the feet can 
rest. 

The stirrups of children’s saddles 
are sometimes so made that the stir¬ 


rups will open at the side if the rider 
is thrown. This lets the foot out 
at once, and saves him from being 
dragged on the ground in case the 
horse runs away. 

The word saddle is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon sadel, Latin sella, saddle, 
which is from sedere , to sit. 

SAFE, a strong box or closet to 
keep money and valuable things in, 
safe from burglars and from fire. 
They are usually double wrought 
IRON chests, filled between the two 
parts with some substance which is 
a non-conductor of HEAT, such as 
plaster of Paris (see Gypsum) and 
MICA, plaster of Paris and alum, fire¬ 
clay and chalk, etc. The iron plates 
on the outside are made thick and 
tough, so that burglars will find them 
hard to bore through, and the doors 
are fitted with strong LOCKS which 
are hard to pick. Small safes are 
made for dwelling-houses, to store 
silver plate in, and very large ones for 
banks and stores, to keep money 
and papers in. 

Valuable papers, jewels, money, 
and other property have often been 
preserved unharmed in safes through 
great fires which burned down the 
buildings in which they stood. In 
the great fire in Chicago, in 1871, 
when a large part of the city was 
burned, many valuable things were 
saved in safes, though most of them 
lay in the burning ruins for several 
days before they could be got out. 

The safe is so named because it 
keeps things safe. The word is 
from the Latin salvus, safe. 

SAFFLOWER, a dyestuff made 
from the flowers of a plant which 
grows in the south of Europe, in 
Egypt, and in Asia. It is wrongly 
called SAFFRON in the United States. 
In the East Indies, whence the most 
is brought, the flowers are dried, 
pressed into little cakes, and then 
packed in bales. Several beautiful 
tints, rose-color, pink, scarlet, and 
crimson, are obtained from safflower 
and used for dyeing silks and cot¬ 
tons. Rouge is also made from it. 







SAFFRON 


527 


SALMON 


The word safflower is made from 
SAFFRON and FLOWER. 

SAFFRON, a yellow coloring 1 mat¬ 
ter obtained from the stigma, or cen¬ 
tre part, of the flower of a kind of 
crocus. The petals of the flowers 
are violet or purple, and the stigma 
orange red. Much labor is required 
to pick the stigmas, and saffron is 
therefore costly. It has an agreeable 
perfume, and is used for flavoring 
and coloring confectionery, cheese, 
and butter. It was formerly used as 
a medicine, but is now known to 
have no value. A weak tea made 
from it is sometimes given to canary 
birds when shedding their feathers. 
Saffron is brought mostly from 
Spain, France, and Germany. 

The word saffron is in Spanish 
azafran , which is from the Arabic 
asafra , yellow. 

SAGE, a sweet smelling plant with 
a scent something like that of cam¬ 
phor, and a warm bitterish taste. It 
is usually dried as an herb, which is 
used for flavoring sausages, cheese, 
soups and other dishes. It is also 
used in domestic medicine, as a 
tonic, and as a gargle for sore throat. 

The word sage is from the Latin 
salvia, sage, which is from salvere, 
to save, and the plant was so named 
because it was thought to save sick 
people. 

SAGO, a kind of food prepared 
from several kinds of palm trees, 
which grow in China, Japan, the 
East Indies, and the islands of the 
Indian archipelago. The trees are 
cut down as soon as they show signs 
of flowering, which takes place 
when they are fourteen or fifteen 
years old. If allowed to blossom 
and bear fruit, they die soon after. 
The trunk is split into pieces and all 
the inside, which is soft, white, and 
spongy, is scraped out and beaten 
in cold water until all the starch or 
sago is separated. This, which is 
the heavy part, settles to the bottom, 
leaving the woody fibre floating. 
The water is then poured off, the 
sago dried, and afterward pounded 


up, sifted, and packed in boxes or 
bags for sale. In this state it is called 
pearl sago, from which puddings are 
made ; and which is much used as 
food for the sick. In the warm cli¬ 
mates where it grows, it is made into 
bread, and is the chief food of mil¬ 
lions of people. A good deal of 
false sago, made from potato starch, 
is sent from Germany and sold for 
the East Indian sago. 

The word sago is from sagu, the 
Malay name for it. 

SALMON, the common name of 
a family of fishes which includes 
the TROUT, SMELT, whitefish, and 
others. Salmon are found in the 
northern parts of North America, 
Europe, and Asia ; but there are 
none in South America or in Africa. 
They live both in the ocean and in 
fresh waters, usually going up the 
rivers in the spring and early sum¬ 
mer, and spawning in the shallow 
streams. They can swim very fast, 
even against, a strong current, and 
will often jump dams and waterfalls 
ten to twelve feet high. When they 
reach their spawning place they dig 
a little trench in the sand on the 
bottom, lay their eggs in it, cover 
them with gravel, and return to the 
sea. The eggs lie all winter, and 
hatch out in March and April. The 
young stay in fresh water about a 
year, when they are about six 
inches long, and then go down to 
the sea. 

The common salmon of the Cana¬ 
dian and New England rivers are 
slaty-blue on the back and silvery- 
white beneath. They are usually 
about three feet long and weigh ten 
to twenty-five pounds, but some are 
caught which weigh more than fifty 
pounds. The flesh of the salmon is 
a reddish yellow. The fresh salmon 
sold in our markets come mostly from 
Maine and from Canada. Pickled 
and canned salmon are brought 
chiefly from the Pacific coast, espe¬ 
cially from the Columbia river in 
Oregon, where great numbers are 
caught every year. The Pacific coast 





SALT 


528 


SALT 


salmon are a different kind from 
those on the Atlantic coast. 

Many salmon are now raised ar¬ 
tificially, and some of our rivers, 
where they had become very scarce 
or had disappeared altogether, have 
been stocked again with them, so 
that they are becoming plentiful once 
more. The same thing is being done 
in England, the rivers of the north 
part of which were once so full of 
salmon that this fish was the cheap¬ 
est of foods. Indeed, it is said that 
workmen were fed on it so much that 
they became sick of it, and it was a 
common thing for men when hiring 
out to bargain that they should have 
salmon to eat only three days in the 
week. But now salmon is a delicacy 
in England and can be enjoyed only 
by the rich. 

The word salmon is from the Latin 
salmo , salmon. 

SALT. Common salt is in chemi¬ 
cal language sodium chloride, being 
a compound made up of one part of 
SODIUM and one part of CHLORINE. 
When pure it is colorless and trans¬ 
parent, that is, so clear that one can 
see through it. It is obtained from 
three sources, beds of rock salt, 
salt springs, and sea-water. When 
rock salt is pure it is mined like other 
minerals, but when it is mixed with 
earth and other impurities, water is 
let into the salt and left there until it 
dissolves it, and the brine is then 
pumped out and evaporated—that 
is, the water is made to pass off as 
steam or vapor and leave the salt. 

Rock Salt. There are immense 
mines of rock salt in Germany and 
in Austria. That at Wieliczka, near 
Cracow, in Poland, is more than a 
quarter of a mile deep and has five 
hundred miles of streets and galler¬ 
ies cut through solid salt. In some 
places are large rooms more than one 
hundred feet high. One of these is 
fitted up as a chapel, in which the 
altar, pulpit, and statues are all 
carved out of salt. There are other 
great mines of rock salt at Stassfurt 
and Anhalt, in Prussia, and in Chesh¬ 


ire, England, and there are hills of 
salt in Spain and in other parts of 
the world. In the United States rock 
salt is found only in Virginia and in 
Louisiana. 

Salt Springs and lakes are found 
all over the world, and much of the 
salt of commerce is made by boiling 
the brine until the water passes off 
as steam, leaving the solid salt in the 
pans. If the brine be boiled down 
quickly, a fine-grained table salt is 
made ; but if it be boiled slowly, the 
product is a hard coarse salt. The 
principal salt springs in this country 
are in New York, Pennsylvania, 
West Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, and 
Michigan ; and there are salt lakes 
in Minnesota, California, Utah, New 
Mexico, Texas, and other States. 
The most important ones are those 
at Syracuse, New York, where many 
hundred men are employed. There 
are also salt wells in different parts 
of the United States, made by bor¬ 
ing very deep into the earth. 

Sea Water Salt. Much salt is 
made from seawater in the West In¬ 
dies, especially in Turk’s island and 
other of the Bahamas. This salt is 
usually hard and coarse, as the 
water is driven off slowly by the sun 
and not by boiling. 

Salt makes a part of almost all 
kinds of food, and is necessary to 
the health and even to the life of man 
and animals. It is largely used for 
pickling fish, meat, and vegetables, 
for making common SODA and CHLO¬ 
RINE, for glazing earthenware, 
and many other things. As some 
countries have no salt, it is one of 
the most important articles of com¬ 
merce. In some parts of Africa it 
is so scarce that to say that a man 
eats salt with his victuals is as much 
as to say that he is rich. 

In Russia it is customary to give 
bread and salt to a stranger as a 
mark of friendship, and among the 
Arabs a man who has eaten salt 
with another one looks upon him as 
a friend even if he had been an 
enemy before. There are many su- 





SALTPETRE 


529 


SAND 


perstitions about salt. For instance, 
some people think it unlucky to spill 
salt between them and a friend. 
This has grown out of the ancient 
belief that salt is incorruptible—that 
is, that it will not decay, and it was 
therefore made the symbol of friend¬ 
ship ; and if it fell between persons 
it was thought that their friendship 
would soon end. 

The word salt is from the Anglo- 
Saxon sealt, Latin sal, salt. 

SALTPETRE or NITRE, a white 
salt, without smell, and with a cool¬ 
ing, bitter taste. It is rightly potas¬ 
sium nitrate, and is made up of PO¬ 
TASSIUM, NITROGEN, and OXY¬ 
GEN. In many places it is found in 
limestone caves, but it is chiefly ob¬ 
tained from the soil of certain warm 
countries, especially Egypt, Persia, 
and India, where it appears as a 
white salt on the surface of the 
ground. About an inch of the earth 
is taken up, and soaked in water in 
large tanks ; the water is then drawn 
off and allowed to dry up, when the 
saltpetre is found in the bottom of 
the tank. The principal use of salt¬ 
petre is for making gunpowder, 
but it is also used in the preparation 
of sulphuric and of nitric acid, in 
making FIREWORKS, and in medi¬ 
cine, especially in cases of sore 
throat and rheumatism. 

The word saltpetre, which means 
salt of rock, is from the Latin sal, 
salt, and petra, a rock ; and the salt 
is so called because it is found on 
the rocks of caves. 

SALTS. In the article Base is 
told how the union of the substances 
called ACIDS with those called bases 
forms a new class of substances, 
which are unlike either of them. 
These new substances are called 
salts, because most of them have a 
general likeness to common salt, 
which was one of the first salts 
known. But all salts are not like 
common salt. Saltpetre and 
ALUM are much like it, but chalk is 
entirely different; yet chalk is a salt 
made by the union of CARBONIC 


acid with the base lime. Glass is 
still more unlike it, but as glass is a 
compound formed by the union of 
silica or silicic acid with bases, such 
as potash, soda, and lime, it is 
properly a salt. 

SAND, fine grains of stone, es¬ 
pecially of quartz, silica, (see Sil¬ 
icon) or FLINT, made by the wear¬ 
ing out of ROCKS. Sand differs in 
fineness, in sharpness, and in color. 
River sand and sand dug out of pits 
are usually sharper than sea sand, 
for this has been rounded by the 
washing of the waves. The colors 
of sand are made by various oxides 
(see Oxygen) of iron. Sand is used 
in making glass, mortar and cement, 
sandpaper, and sand or hour 
glasses, in making moulds for cast¬ 
ing iron, brass, and other metals 
(see Metal Work and Statue) 
in sawing and polishing building 
stones, and in grinding and polish¬ 
ing cutlery. 

Sand Blast. This is one of the 
most wonderful uses • of sand, by 
means of which glass, stone, metals, 
or any other hard substance may be 
cut or engraved. If a stream of 
sharp sand be let fall from a high 
box (as high as the ceiling of a 
room) through a tube on to a plate 
of glass held under it, the sand will 
cut away little grains of the glass till 
at length the whole surface will be 
cut or scratched and it will look like 
ground glass. If, instead of cutting 
the glass all over, it is wanted to en¬ 
grave a pattern or figure on it, the 
w r orkman has only to cover the parts 
of the glass which he does not want 
cut, with a stencil plate made of 
leather, rubber, paper, wax, etc., for 
the sand will not cut any soft sub¬ 
stance. By this means only the un¬ 
covered parts are cut, and when the 
stencil is taken off the pattern will 
be seen. 

Mr. Tilghman, of Philadelphia, 
who first found out how to do this, 
has made a machine in which the 
sand is blown on to the thing to be 
cut, by a blast of air or steam. The 






SANDAL WOOD 


530 


SANDSTONE 


sand is thus made to act with 
greater force, cutting much more 
quickly, and the air or steam blows 
away the sand as fast as its work is 
done and leaves the plate clean, so 
that the workman can see it. Glass 
signs, glass globes for lamps and 
gas-burners, tumbler, goblets, and 
other glass ware may be engraved 
in this way very fast and with the 
most beautiful designs. A glass 
plate engraved by the sand-blast is 
shown in the picture. Metals and 
stones may also 
be cut by means 
of the sand¬ 
blast, which 
will not only 
scratch the sur¬ 
face but will cut 
it away to any 
depth. The 
marble tomb¬ 
stones put up 
in the national 
cemeteries t o 
the memory of 
soldiers killed in 
the war were 
made in this 
way. Iron let¬ 
ters were fast¬ 
ened on to the 
smooth face of 
the stone, which 
was then put 
under the sand¬ 
blast, and the 
sand cut away 
all the marble 
not covered 
by the letters. 
When the iron patterns were taken 
off, the letters were left raised as if 
they had been cut out with the chisel. 
The work was done so fast that 
three hundred headstones were made 
in a day, or as many as three hun¬ 
dred men could have done in the 
same time, working with the ham¬ 
mer and chisel. 

The w r ord sand is Anglo-Saxon. 

SANDAL WOOD, the wood of a 
tree which grows in India and China. 


It is quite heavy, has a fine grain, 
and a sweet perfume and spicy taste. 
The Chinese use a great deal of it 
for making small boxes and other 
cabinet work and toys, and for the 
frames of fans. They also burn it as 
incense in their temples. In the East 
Indies it is used instead of boxwood 
for wood engraving. It is good for 
making cabinets for insects, because 
insects do not like the smell of it. 
The roots, chips, and sawdust of 
sandal wood are made into sandal 
wood oil, which is used in per¬ 
fumery. Red sandal wood, some¬ 
times called sanders wood, is of a 
deep red color and takes a fine pol¬ 
ish. It is used mostly as a dye stuff, 
and is used for coloring the red 
spirits of lavender, bitters, and other 
things. 

The word sandal is Arabic. 

SANDPAPER. Paper covered on 
one side with fine grit, used for 
smoothing wood, bone, ivory, met¬ 
als, and other things. It is made by 
smearing stiff brown paper with glue 
and sifting sand upon it while wet. 
About six different sizes of sand 
are used, to make sandpaper of 
different fineness. A kind of sand¬ 
paper called glasspaper is made by 
grinding up broken wine-bottles, 
and using the siftings in the same 
way as sand. Sometimes burnt and 
ground flint is used also. Emery 
paper is made in the same way. 

The word sandpaper is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon sand , and paper, 
which is from the Latin papyrus , 
paper. 

SANDSTONE, a kind of rock 
formed of grains of sand, cemented 
together by carbonate of LIME, oxide 
of 1 RON, silica (see SILICON), or clay. 
Fine-grained sandstone is used for 
building, and coarse-grained for 
millstones. Coarse sandstones some¬ 
times have pebbles in them, and are 
then called pudding-stones. Some 
sandstones are very lasting, while 
others wear out very soon when ex¬ 
posed to the weather ; the cement by 
which the grains of sand are held 




























SAPPHIRE 


53i 


SARDINE 


together being loosened by air and 
moisture, the stone falls to pieces. 
The sandstone used in this country 
for building is brought mostly from 
Connecticut, New Jersey, and Nova 
Scotia. The Connecticut river 
stone, sometimes called Portland 
stone, and the New Jersey stone are 
dark brown and furnish the mate¬ 
rial for the “ brown stone fronts” of 
houses in New York City. Nova 
Scotia stone is yellowish brown ; it 
also is much used for house fronts in 
New York. A light yellow sand¬ 
stone, brought from Caen, in 
France, is sometimes used in this 
country, and makes a very handsome 
building stone. 

The word sandstone is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon sand , and stan, 
stone. 

SAPPHIRE, a PRECIOUS stone, 
next to the diamond in hardness. 
What is commonly called the sap¬ 
phire is a beautiful purplish-blue 
stone,'which is next to the ruby in 
value, but there are really sapphires 
of several different colors. They are 
all made up of the same thing, alum¬ 
ina (see Aluminum), but colored in 
different ways. The red sapphire is 
properly called the oriental RUBY, the 
green sapphire the oriental emer¬ 
ald, the yellow the oriental TOPAZ, 
and the violet the oriental ame¬ 
thyst. The word oriental used in 
this way does not refer to the East, 
but only means something very fine. 
Colorless sapphires are sometimes 
found, and are set and sold for dia¬ 
monds, but they are not so bright as 
diamonds. They are called white 
sapphires. The finest blue sapphires 
come from Ceylon, but some are 
brought from India and Persia, and 
a few from Russia. 

The word sapphire is from the 
Latin sapphirus, Hebrew sappir , 
sapphire. 

SARDINE, the common name of 
the young of a fish of the herring 
family, which, when it grows up, is 
called the pilchard. It is an elegant 
little fish, with a slim, graceful body 


three to four inches long, greenish- 
blue on the back and silvery-white 
below. Sardines are found in the 
Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, 
and the Baltic. A large part of those 
which are sold are caught off the 
coast of Brittany, France. Early in 
spring these little fish appear in 
large shoals, often so closely packed 
together that many are shoved out 
of the water, and they keep on 
coming all summer long. They 
are caught with nets, the meshes 
of which are just large enough to 
let through the head of the fish, 
which is thus caught by the gills or 
fins. 

When a shoal is seen, the boats 
put off from shore and the nets are 
cast. The nets are very long, and 
are fitted with floats of cork at the 
top and lead sinkers at the bottom, 
so that when one is put into the 
water it stands up straight and forms 
a kind of long wall, reaching from 
the top of the water down very deep. 
It is set in a curve, and bait is 
thrown overboard. The sardines 
rush in to get the bait, and get their 
heads caught in the net. As soon as 
one net is full another one is set, 
and the first is hauled in. The boats 
are loaded and the fish taken ashore, 
where they are at once washed, 
scraped, and salted, their heads and 
gills cut off, and then washed again 
and dried in the sun on frames along 
the shore. When dry they are 
cooked in great kettles of boiling 
olive oil for two hours, and dried 
again, when they are ready for 
packing in the tin cases in which we 
usually see them. This is done by 
women, who fit them into the boxes, 
pour boiling oil over them, fit on the 
lid and seal it. 

Sometimes sprats, shiners, roach, 
and dace are put up in the same 
way and sold for real sardines. A 
large part of all those called sardines 
which are sent to the United States 
are these fish. In the United States 
the menhaden is called the American 
sardine. It is caught on the New 




SARSAPARILLA 


532 


SAW 


Jersey coast, put up in oil, and sent 
to Europe in large quantities. 

The sardine is named from the 
island of Sardinia, off the shores of 
which many of these fish are caught. 

SARSAPARILLA, the dried roots 
of several kinds of climbing ever¬ 
green plants, which grow in Mexico 
and Central and South America. 
The roots are reddish-brown, about 
as large as a goose quill, and nine 
or ten feet long. Sarsaparilla is 
much used as a medicine, especially 
in rheumatic and skin diseases. The 
patent medicines called sarsaparillas 
and the syrup drunk in soda have 
none of this drug in them. 

The word sarsaparilla is from 
the Spanish zarzaparilla, 
thorny-vine, from zarza, thorn, 
and parilla, vine. 

SASSAFRAS, a tree of the 
same family with the laurel, 
growing only in North America. 

In the Northern States it is little 
more than a bush, but in the 
Southern States it grows as 
high as a high house (50 feet). 

The tree is very fragrant, but 
its scent is not liked by insects, 
and trunks and drawers made 
from its wood are therefore 
good to keep furs and woollen 
things in. The bark of the 
roots has a sharp sweetish 
taste. A kind of tea is made 
from it, which is used as a 
domestic medicine, and is 
thought to purify the blood. The 
dried root is sold in drug stores, and 
is given in cases of rheumatism and 
skin diseases. Sassafras oil is made 
from the roots by distillation (see 
Alcohol). 

The word sassafras is said to be 
from the Spanish salsafras. 

SAW. Saws differ in shape, size, 
and in the form of their teeth, ac¬ 
cording to the kind of work for 
which they are made. The chief 
kinds in common use are the hand 
saw, 'of which there are many vari¬ 
eties, all of which are used by one 
hand ; the cross-cutting saw, with 


a handle at each end, which is 
worked by two men and is used for 
cutting timber crosswise ; and the 
circular saw, which is always worked 
by machinery. 

A good saw ought to be of equal 
thickness in the blade, and so elastic 
or springy that when bent into a 
bow it will spring back into shape 
again. Great care therefore has to 
be taken in its manufacture. The 
blade is cut with large shears (see 
Scissors) out of a sheet of steel 
made by rolling out an ingot or 
heavy bar of cast steel. After the 
edges have been ground smooth on 


a grindstone, the teeth are made by 
cutting out small pieces with a punch 
worked by machinery, the blade 
being shifted one tooth forward at a 
time until the whole row is cut. The 
teeth are then sharpened by filing 
off the rough edges, and the blade 
is tempered or hardened by heating it 
red hot and plunging it into a mixture 
of oil, tallow, and resin, after which 
it is planished, or made smooth 
and even, by hammering with a 
smooth-faced hammer on an anvil 
of polished steel. It is then ground 
so that it shall be a little thinner at 
the back than on the edge, and next 








SCALES 


533 


SCALES 


set. Setting consists in bending the 
teeth by striking them with a nar¬ 
row hammer so that half of them 
shall turn to one side and half to the 
other side. This makes the cut of 
the saw a little wider than the blade, 
and prevents its being choked with 
sawdust. The handle, which is 
usually of beech wood, is then put 
on, and the saw is finished by clean¬ 
ing with EMERY. 

Circular saws are now much used 
in saw mills, as they work faster 
than straight saws. They are made 
to turn very fast in a slit through a 
table or bench, and the wood to be 
cut is pushed up against them. In 
those for sawing hard wood the 
teeth are made much smaller than 
in those for sawing soft wood. The 
teeth are made of many different 
shapes, as in the picture, where to 
save space several kinds are put on 
to one saw, a different kind of tooth 
being shown between each of the 
little holes around the edge; but in 
real saws each one has only one kind 
of teeth. Saws are also made with 
movable teeth, so that a new one 
can be put on when one is broken, 
or all can be taken off to be sharp¬ 
ened. 

The word saw is from the Anglo- 
Saxon sage, saw. 

SCALES. The word scale once 
meant the pan of a balance, but now 
the name is used for the balance it¬ 
self. In this article it is given to 
any kind of weighing machine. 
The simplest and probably the old¬ 
est kind is the common even bal¬ 
ance scale, which has a beam with 
arms of the same length, from the 
ends of which are hung the scale 
pans. The beam is sometimes hung 
up by a hook in the middle, as shown 
in Fig. i, which is a small hand scale 
used in weighing gold, or held up 
by a post, as in Fig. 2, which shows 
a scale used by apothecaries in 
weighing medicines, and by chemists 
in weighing different substances. 
As the greatest of care has to be 
taken in such weighing, these scales 


are kept shut up in a glass case, as 
shown in the picture, to keep them 
free from dust. Some of them are 
so delicate that the air which is mov¬ 
ing in a room, and even the heat 
from a person’s body, will cause the 
beam to move. When any thing is 



Fig. 1.—Scale for Weighing Gold. 

to be weighed in them, the doors of 
the case are opened, the thing to be 
weighed and the right weights put 
into the pans, and the doors then 
closed again. Thus the air of the 
room and the heat of the person 
weighing is shut off from the scale, 
and the beam can be more evenly 
balanced. 

Another kind of even balance 
scale is shown in Fig. 3. This scale, 
which is much used by grocers, is 
the same in principle as Figs. 1 and 



Fig. 2.—Apothecaries’ Scale. 

2, the only difference being that the 
pans are placed above the beam in¬ 
stead of being hung below it. 

The steelyard is another very old 
form of weighing machine, having 
been in use by the ancient Romans, 
who called it statera. It differs 










SCALES 


534 


SCALES 


from the even balance scale in hav¬ 
ing one arm of the beam short and 
the other long. In the even bal¬ 
ance scale a weight equal to the 
thing to'be weighed has to be put 
into the other pan. For instance, if 
a load of ten pounds is to be 
weighed, it must be balanced by ten 
pounds of weights. In weighing 



Fig. 3.—Grocers’ Even Balance Scale. 

heavy things this was found to be 
very inconvenient, so the beam was 
made with one long and one short 
arm, the thing to be weighed being 
hung on the short arm and the 
weight on the long one. A very 
much lighter weight is thus needed 
to balance the thing weighed, and 
the further the weight is pushed 
along toward the end of the long 
arm the greater weight it will bal¬ 
ance. The steelyard is not so good 
as the even balance scale for weigh¬ 
ing small things, but it is very use¬ 
ful for weighing heavy 
things. Still, very small 
ones are sometimes 
used. The one shown 
in the picture, Fig. 4, is 
called a grain tester, 
which tells how many 
pounds a bushel of any 
kind of grain will 

Fig. 4. weigh. The cup, which 
Grain Tester. jn some 0 f these tes , ers 

holds only a half pint, is filled with 
grain, and the little weight on the 
beam is then pushed along until the 
cup is balanced ; and the figures on 
the beam where the weight stops 
show the number of pounds of the 
grain in a bushel. In Fig. 5 is 
shown a larger kind of steelyard, 
used for weighing bales of cotton. 
This kind of steelyard is called a 


weighers’ beam. It is not exactly 
like the old steelyard, but the prin¬ 
ciple is the same. When a bale of 
cotton is to be weighed, the iron 
handle, on the top of the frame, 
which looks like a pump handle, is 
unhooked from the little catch seen 
near its middle. This lets the 
beam down far enough to catch the 
four hooks into the sides of the bale, 
and the handle is then pushed down 
and hooked in the catch again. By 
this means the cotton bale is raised 
up from the ground. It is then 
weighed by pushing the weight 
along the beam until it balances, and 
the figures on the beam where the 
weight stops shows the weight of 
the bale. 



Fig. 5.—Weighers' Beam. 


It will be seen that this weighers’ 
beam has two weights on it, one 
large one and one small one. This 
is because the beam has two sets of 
figures, one on one side and one on 
the other side of the beam. In 
weighing light things the small 
weight is used on the one side of the 
beam, and in weighing heavy things 
the large weight is used on the 
other side. The steelyard has but 
one weight, and the two sets of fig¬ 
ures are on the top and bottom of 
the beam, and when a heavy thing 
is to be weighed the beam has to be 
turned over so as to bring the large 
set of figures on top. 

Platform scales are usually made, 
like steelyards,with a beam with arms 







SCALES 


535 


SCALES 


of unequal length, so that the prin¬ 
ciple of the two is the same. The 
chief difference between them is that 
in the platform scale the thing 
weighed, instead of being hung un- 



Fig. 6.—Counter Platform Scale. 

der the beam, as in the steelyard, is 
put on a platform which is joined by 
an iron rod to the short end of the 
beam, so that when the platform is 
pressed down the beam is pulled 
down. Some platform scales are 
made small enough to stand on a 
counter or table, like the one in Fig. 
6, and some are large enough to 
weigh a load of coal or hay, a rail¬ 


road car filled with freight, or even a 
drove of cattle. In the picture, Fig. 
7, a load of hay is being weighed on 
a platform scale. Two weights are 
used in weighing heavy things on 
these scales. The weights hung on 
the end of the beam mark the hun¬ 
dreds, and the one which slides 
along on the beam marks the parts 
of a hundred. For instance, if the 
load of hay weighs 2050 pounds, 
weights for 2000 pounds will be 
hung on the end of the beam, and the 
sliding weight will be pushed along 


until it comes to 50, when the beam 
will exactly balance. 

Small scales made on the same 
principle as the platform scale, but 
having the pan or platform for the 
thing weighed above instead of be¬ 
low the beam, are much used by 
grocers, druggists, etc., on counters. 
One of these is shown in Fig. 8. The 
letter balance, used for weighing let- 



Fig. 8.—Druggists’ Counter Scale. 

ters, shown in Fig. 9, is made on the 
same principle. 

The spring balance, another kind 
of scale on a different principle, is 
much used by butchers. The spring 
is made of a wire coiled up. The top 
of the wire is fastened to the 
top of a rod, which is so 
made that when the rod is 
pulled down a pointer is 
made to turn round a disk 
like a clock face, on which 
are figures and marks show¬ 
ing the pounds and parts of 
a pound. The one shown in 
the picture will weigh any 
thing up to twenty pounds’ 
weight. At the bottom of 
the rod is a hook, on which 
is hung a pan for the things to be 
weighed. In some spring balances 
the pointer moves up and down in a 



Fig. 9.—Letter Balance. 


slit in the face, and the figures are 
marked on it in much the same way 
as on the scale of a thermometer. 



Fig. 7.—Platform Scale. 










SCALLOP 


536 


SCISSORS 



Fig. 10. 

Spring Balance. 


The word scale is from the Anglo- 
Saxon scdlu t the dish of a balance. 
Balance is made up of the Latin 
bis y twice, and lanx, plate, so that 
it means a pair of scales. Steelyard 
is a changed form of staple-yard , 
that is, the yard or 
beam used at the 
staple. In England, 
in old times, the 
king’s staple or 
market was set up 
in certain towns, 
and certain kinds of 
goods could not be 
sent out of the coun¬ 
try until they had 
been first brought 
to these places and 
charged the duties 
payable to the king. 
Such goods were 
called staple goods, because they 
were brought to the king’s staple, 
and the beam with which they 
were weighed was called a staple- 
yard. 

SCALLOP, a kind of shell-fish, 
having a nearly round ribbed shell 
with scalloped edges. The shell is 
very light and the fish has inside a 
little air bag which enables it to 
float. It can move also by opening 
and shutting its shell. The scallop 
is found along the coasts of New 
England, New York, and New Jer¬ 
sey, and is much used for food. 
Only the hard muscular part is 
eaten. The shells can be made into 
pretty pincushions and ornaments 
for frames, boxes, etc. 

The scallop abounds on the coast 
of Palestine, and in old times pil¬ 
grims returning from the Holy 
Land used to wear them to show 
that they had been there. A scal¬ 
lop found off the coast of England 
has a large shell which was much 
used formerly for cooking oysters 
in ; and from this the dish has ever 
since been called scalloped oysters. 

The word scallop was formerly 
spelled escalop, and is from the old 
French escallop , scallop. 


SCISSORS and SHEARS. Scis¬ 
sors are made up of three parts, the 
blades, the bows, or rings to put 
the fingers in, and the shanks, or 
parts between the blades and the 
bows. The best scissors are made 
of cast steel, but some are made 
of shear steel, some partly of steel 
and partly of iron, and some of com¬ 
mon cast IRON. The kinds most 
in use are made of shear steel, and 
have only the blades hardened. 
Large scissors, such as tailors’ 
shears, have the blades only of 
steel, the bows and the shank being 
made of iron. Only the cheapest 
scissors are made of cast iron. 

Scissor blades are forged in 
much the same way as knife 
blades. One blade is made at a 
time, and enough of the metal is cut 
off with it to form the shank and 
the bow. A hole is then punched 
through this metal large enough to 
let in the point of a small anvil, 
upon which the bow is hammered 
into shape. The parts are then 
shaped better by filing, and the hole 
for the rivet is bored. The blades 
are next ground, and the bows and 
other parts are polished with emery 
and oil. The blades are then fitted 
together, the screw is put in, and 
the parts are made to work smoothly. 
The two parts are next bound 
round with fine iron wire, the screw 
is taken out, and the blades and 
shanks are hardened by heatingthem 
and cooling them quickly in water. 
After the wire is taken off the 
blades are ground again, fastened 
together, and made to work right, 
and lastly polished and finished. 

A great many different kinds of 
scissors are made, such as cutting- 
out scissors, button-hole scissors, 
and other kinds used by women ; 
scissors for cutting paper, hair, lace, 
and the nails ; for trimming flow¬ 
ers, grape vines, and other shrub¬ 
bery ; for trimming horses and 
shearing sheep ; and scissors and 
shears for the use of tailors, sta¬ 
tioners, bankers, barbers, book- 







SCISSORS 


537 


SCISSORS 


binders, tinsmiths, iron - workers, 
etc. The shears used for cutting 
tin, sheet iron, sheet copper, and 
other sheet metals are made with 
very strong blades, one of which is 
fixed tight, so that the upper han¬ 
dle may be used with both hands. 


A picture of one of these is given in 
Fig. i. In this, A is the part fast¬ 
ened to the workman’s bench, and B 
is the part which is moved ; so this 
kind of shears has but one handle. 

A still stronger kind, used for 
cutting bars of iron one to two 


B C 

A 

Fig. i.—Shears for Cutting Sheet Metal. 



inches thick, is shown in Fig. 2. In 
this the two blades, marked a and 
b, are of iron and have steel edges 
fastened on to them with bolts. The 
lower blade is fixed, and the upper 
one moves on a pivot at P. The 
handle of the shears runs down to R, 
and is there fastened to a rod M, 
which is worked by the steam-engine 
which moves the other machinery. 
Every time the axle of the engine 
turns round, the rod -M moves 
backward and forward, thus open- 



Fig. 2.—Shears for Cutting Bar Iron. 

ing and shutting the jaws of the 
shears. 

Another kind of shears works with 
a spring, which keeps the blades 
always open. All the workman has 
to do is to close the blades together 
by shutting his hand, and every 
time he opens his hand the blades 


spring open again. One of this kind 
is shown in Fig. 3, in which the 
round part is the spring. Such 
shears are used for shearing sheep, 
clipping horses, etc. 

The blades of scissors and shears 
are not like knife blades, which are 
sharpened on both sides, but like 
chisels, which are sharpened on but 
one side; so scissors are really 
double chisels, the blades of which 
are made to move toward each 
other and cut whatever comes be¬ 
tween them. In some machines the 
two blades are made round like 
wheels, which move toward each 
other, so that the edges shut close 



Fig. 3.—Sheep Shears. 


together and cut whatever is pushed 
against them. This makes an end¬ 
less pair of scissors, for the blades 
never cease shutting together while 
the machine is working. Such 
shears are used by paper makers 
and other manufacturers. 

The word scissors is from the old 
English sisoures , which is from th : 
Latin scindere , sczssum, to cut. 
Shears is from the Anglo-Saxon 
seer an, to cut off, to divide. 



























SCREW 


538 


SCYTHE 


SCREW. The common screw, 
used instead of nails to fasten pieces 
of wood together, consists of a head 
with a slit across it for the screw¬ 
driver, and a long part, the upper 
end of which, called the shank, is 
round and smooth, and the lower 
end, called the thread, which is cut 
round in a spiral, tapers slightly 
toward the point. In old times 
screws were made wholly by hand, 
but now they are made much faster 
and better by machines. Round wire 
of the proper size is drawn from a 
reel, in much the same way as in 
the PIN machine, a piece of the 
right length is cut off, and the 
head is made on it by several blows 
from a die or punch. The blank 
thus formed next drops into a box, 
in which it is carried to another ma¬ 
chine to have the slit made in the 
head. This machine has in it a 
wheel without a rim, that is, with 
spokes only, each of which is 
forked at the end. As the wheel 
turns round, each spoke picks up 
one of the screw blanks by the head 
and carries it past a small circular 
saw which in a moment cuts the 
slit for the screw-driver. The blanks 
are then put into a LATHE-chuck, 
one by one, and made to move to 
and fro, while a fixed tool cuts 
the thread evenly and smoothly. 
Thus all the workmen have to do 
is to see that the machines are 
properly fed with the blanks. One 
of the most valuable of the modern 
improvements in screws is the 
making them with sharp points, 
like the point of a gimlet, which 
causes them to enter the wood 
much more easily than the old 
style of screw. All the best 
machines for screw-making are 
American inventions. 

The word screw is from the old 
English scrue, old French escroue , 
screw. 

SCUP or SCUPPAUG, a salt 
water fish, often called porgy. 
The common scup is caught from 
Massachusetts to Georgia. It is 


a broad fish, usually less than a 
foot long, and is a dusky pink above 
and silvery below. It is easily caught 
with hook and line, clam bait being 
generally used, and is very good 
eating when fresh. 

The word scup is shortened from 
the Indian mishcup , large-scaled ; 
and scuppaug from mishcuppadog , 
the plural of mishcup. 

SCYTHE, an instrument for cut¬ 
ting grass, grain, bushes, and weeds. 



The scythe is a kind of large sickle, 
a tool which was probably in use be¬ 
fore the scythe. Both instruments 
were known to the Romans, who 
used them not only as farmers’ 
tools, but also as weapons of war. 
The ancient sickle was like that 
now in use, but the scythe had a 
straight handle instead of a crooked 
one. 



The Sickle is not used in this 
country, grain being usually cut 
here with either the cradle or the 
reaping machine, but it is still used 
in Great Britain and in other parts of 
Europe. Its form can be seen in 
the picture, where the edge is shown 
smooth ; but in some sickles the 
edge is made toothed like a saw. 








SCYTHE 


539 


SCYTHE 


In reaping, the harvester takes as 
much of the grain as he can hold in 
the left hand, and then cuts off the 
stalks as close to the ground as 
possible with the 
sickle. The hand¬ 
fuls are laid as fast 
as cut on a band 
made of some of the 
straws twisted to¬ 
gether, and when 
enough are thus 
collected they are 
tied up in the band 
and made into a 
Sheaf. sheaf, like that in 
the picture. In the 
United States a kind of sickle called 
a grass hook is used for trimming 
grass borders and parts of lawns 
where scythes and lawn mowers 
cannot be used. 




Grass Scythe and Snath. 

The Scythe is used mostly for cut¬ 
ting grass, especially on small farms 
where it would not pay to buy a 
mowing machine. The grass scythe 


has a long slender blade, which is 
slightly curved as in the picture. 
Scythe blades are forged under a 
trip-HAMMER, and then ground into 
a good shape on grindstones. The 
handle, called in New England a 
snath and in England a sned or helve, 
is made of wood, bent as in the pic¬ 
ture, and has two handles. Scythes 
with short stout blades, called bill 
hooks or bush scythes, are used by 
farmers for cutting down bushes, 
brambles, and rank weeds. On 
most large farms mowing machines, 
drawn by horses, which cut grass 



very fast, are now used. The best 
kinds of these, as well as of reaping 
machines, were first made in this 
country, and are largely used all 
over the world. Lawn mowers, for 
clipping closely the grass of lawns, 
are made to be drawn by horses or 
to be used by hand ; the hand ma¬ 
chines, which are small and light, 
being used mostly for trimming the 
grass in dooryards. 

Cradles are scythes for cutting 
grain : they have above the blade a 
framework of wooden bars which 
catches the grain when it falls and 









SEAL 


540 


SEAL 


lays it straight so that it may easily 
be gathered into a sheaf or bundle. 
The snath and the blade are like 
those of the grass scythe, only the 
blade is a little broader and heavier. 
The pictures show two kinds of cra¬ 
dles. The one called the turkey¬ 
wing cradle is used in the North¬ 
ern States for cutting grain. The 
Southern cradle, which is heavier and 
stronger, is used in the Southern 
States, mostly for cutting rice. 



The word scythe is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon sidhe, scythe. Sickle is 
from the Anglo-Saxon sicol, Latin 
secula, sickle, which is from sec are, 
to cut. 

SEAL. The body of the seal is 
long and slender, and tapering to¬ 
ward the tail. It has a small head, 
some like a dog’s with the ears cut 
off, strong whiskers like those of a 
cat, and large, soft, sad eyes. The 
front limbs are very short, so that 
the paws are near the body ; the 
hinder limbs are turned backward 
on each side of the tail. All the 
paws are like paddles, being cov¬ 
ered with a skin which stretches 
between the fingers. The seal 


swims mostly by the aid of the 
hinder limbs, which are worked like 
sculls, the front ones being used 
only to turn about with. It can 
swim very fast and is skilful in div¬ 
ing, being able to stay under water 
fifteen to twenty minutes ; but it 
moves very awkwardly on land, 
making short, jerky leaps, and drag¬ 
ging the hinder limbs along. Its 
body is covered next to the skin 
with a smooth thick fur, over which 
grow long shiny hairs. 

Seals live during warm weather 
mostly in the cold regions of the 
north and south poles, and go into 
milder waters in the winter. Their 
food is chiefly fish, and they some¬ 
times chase salmon quite far up 
rivers. Occasionally one comes into 
New York bay, and lately many 
have been seen in the Connecticut 
river. They like to bask in the sun 
upon rocks, sand banks, or ice-floes, 
always keeping a good lookout for 
danger. They can see far, and 
their sense of smell is very sharp. 

Seals live mostly on mollusks, 
crabs, and fish. In the winter they 
make holes in the ice, where they 
can come up to breathe. Sometimes 
one comes out to eat a fish, as shown 
in the picture. The Esquimaux 
watch near seal holes until one is 
seen coming up ; then crawl softly 
along on the ice, making a cry like 
a seal, and the poor animal, who 
takes it for another seal, does not 
discover its mistake until it gets a 
deadly blow. 

Seals are among the most useful 
of animals to man. The Greenland¬ 
ers use their flesh for food ; their oil 
for light, warmth, and cooking; 
their skins for clothes, boots, and 
coverings of boats and tents ; their 
sinews for thread and fishing lines ; 
the skins of the entrails for window 
curtains and shirts ; and their blood 
for making soup. Seal skins are an 
important article of commerce, and 
the seal fishery is largely carried on 
along the coast of Newfoundland 
and Labrador, and also on the 







SEAL 


54i 


SEALING-WAX 


islands off the coast of Alaska. The 
fur in its natural state is yellowish, 
spotted and marked with brown, 
and is unfit for use until it is dyed. 
Dressed seal skins are largely used for 
ladies’ cloaks, caps, etc. The skins 
are tanned sometimes and made into 
a fine soft leather for pocketbooks, 
card cases, and other things. Seal 
oil, made from the blubber or fat, is 
more valuable than whale oil. 

Seals are easily tamed, are very 
fond of caresses, and may be taught 
to do many tricks. They know their 
master’s voice and will come at his 
call. For many years two tame 
seals were kept in the Zoological 
Gardens in Amsterdam, Holland, 


where they were often visited by an 
old man, his little granddaughter, 
and a small French poodle dog. As 
they always brought the seals some¬ 
thing to eat, they were very fond of 
them, and would come quickly out 
of the water when they saw them, 
frolic about, and play many pretty 
tricks. One day the dog, in playing 
with the seals, jumped too far, and 
fell into the pond. After struggling 
for a while, it sunk to the bottom. 
The two seals uttered a cry, ran 
to the water, and plunged in ; and 
the next moment the male seal came 
up with the half-drowned dog in its 
mouth and carefully laid it at the 
little girl’s feet. 



Seal Eating a Fish. 


Near the city of San Francisco, 
and not far from a hotel on the 
shore, is a rock called Seal Rock, 
which is usually covered with seals, 
who sport there all day long, to the 
great amusement of the people who 
watch them from the hotel piazza. 
They are not at all afraid, for no 
one is permitted to harm them. In 
warm sunny days they may be seen 
climbing up on to the rocks and 
sliding down again into the water, 
barking as if they enjoyed it. Some 
sleep in the sun, wake up and bark, 
slide down into the sea, and then 
crawl up again and bark and bark, 
keeping it up all day long. 

The seal is a mammal of the or¬ 


der carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals. 

The word seal is from the Anglo- 
Saxon seol, seal. 

SEALING-WAX. This was for¬ 
merly much used for sealing letters, 
but as letters sealed with it are apt 
to stick together in warm countries, 
gummed envelopes have now al¬ 
most taken its place. It is still used 
to some extent in fixing seals to 
legal and state papers, the seal be¬ 
ing pressed on the wax when hot. 
Sealing wax is made of LAC mixed 
with a little turpentine and resin and 
some coloring matter. Red sealing 
wax is colored with vermilion, and 
black with ivory black. Golden 





















SEAWEEDS 


542 


SEAWEEDS 


sealing wax has powdered yellow 
mica mixed with the lac. Sealing 
wax was first made in India, and 
was not known in Europe until about 
two hundred years ago. 

The word sealing-wax is made up 
of seal, from the Anglo-Saxon sigel , 
Latin sigillum , a seal or stamp, and 
wax, from the Anglo-Saxon weax, 
wax. 

SEAWEEDS, plants growing 
wholly in water, fresh or salt. 
Some are found only in fresh water, 
some only in salt, and some in both. 
Some are so small and delicate that 
they can be seen only with a MICRO¬ 
SCOPE, and others are of such im¬ 
mense growths that they almost fill 
up the seas in which they live. The 
great seaweeds called sea aprons 
are often several hundred feet long. 

Seaweeds are not much like the 
plants which grow on land. They 
have no roots and therefore do not 
get any of their food from the earth, 
but live entirely from the water. 
Many float around in the water and 
many are fastened to rocks and 
other things at the bottom of the 
sea, to which they are made fast by 
a kind of stem with a sticky sur¬ 
face. They have no real leaves, but 
have parts which answer for leaves. 
Sometimes these are like wavy 
thongs, sometimes like crumpled 
threads ; others are like fans, bal¬ 
loons, leather belts, delicate ribbons, 
or shreds of jelly. Some are thick 
and tough, others thin and tender ; 
and they are of many colors, such as 
fawn, yellow, brown, olive, green, 
pink, and carmine. Those in deep 
waters are mostly brown of different 
shades, and those nearer the surface 
and often floating are mostly green ; 
the pinks and reds are chiefly found 
in shallow water near the shore. 

In the bottom of the ocean the 
seaweeds form great groves and 
woods, which lace their branches 
together and make grottoes and gal¬ 
leries. Many are larger than any 
trees on land, and as they are many 
colored, they are probably far more 


beautiful than our forests. The sea 
weeds which float often form islands 
which drift about in the currents. 
Not far from the Azores is an im¬ 
mense bank of seaweed, called the 
Sargasso Sea from the kind of weed 
(sargassum) of which it is made up. 
When Columbus was on his way to 
the New World, he was greatly as¬ 
tonished at this floating mass, and 
his men feared that they had come 
to the end of the navigable sea. 
Sometimes these plants gather 
round ships so as almost to stop 
them. 

Many of the seaweeds are very 
useful to man. In the eastern parts 
of Europe they are dried for fuel 
and put on land for manure. The 
seaweed called bladder-wrack and 
knobbed rack were once much used 
for making kelp (see Soda). In 
northern Europe these are fed to 
pigs, and when food is scarce even 
horses and cattle thrive on them. In 
Holland a kind of seaweed is used 
in building dykes or banks to keep 
the sea from flowing on to the land, 
and the same kind is also used for 
stuffing mattresses and cushions and 
for packing goods. The Sandwich 
Islanders, the Chinese and Japanese, 
the Icelanders, and many other 
peoples eat various kinds of sea¬ 
weeds. The edible birds’ nests of 
the Chinese are said to be built by 
swallows out of a kind of seaweed 
which has much GELATINE in it. 
Another kind in China contains so 
much gelatine that it is largely used 
for making glue and varnish. 
Among the most useful of the sea¬ 
weeds is that commonly called Irish 
moss or carrageen, which takes the 
place of isinglass in making blanc 
mange and jellies, and is used also 
in making sizing and lager bier. It 
is a deep rich green when gathered, 
but is bleached white by wetting it 
with sea water and drying it. 
About five thousand barrels are col¬ 
lected every year on the coast of 
Massachusetts and sent to New 
York and Philadelphia. Dulse, a 





SEAWEEDS 


543 


SEED 


purple seaweed, called dillesk by the 
Irish, is also collected and used for 
food. 

Many beautiful seaweeds are 
found along our coasts, and when 
they are gathered and arranged 
properly they make very handsome 
collections. Only moist and fresh 
pieces should be collected. They 
should be first soaked in a basin of 
fresh water, to clean them from 
sand and salt. Then select a good 
piece, lay it in a soup-plate filled 
with fresh water, and slip under it a 
sheet of white paper. While in the 
water the seaweed may be easily 
spread out evenly on the paper by 
means of a camel’s-hair pencil or 
brush. When this has been done the 
paper may be raised gently from 
the water, and the seaweed will keep 
its form. Let the water drain off and 
then lay the paper on a sheet of blot¬ 
ting paper ; over the seaweed lay a 
piece of linen cloth, and over that 
another sheet of blotting paper. 
The linen cloth is put in to keep the 
blotting paper from sticking to the 
seaweed. After arranging all the 
pieces of seaweed in this way, pile 
them up between two boards and 
put some weights on them, and 
leave them for three or four days to 
dry. When dry, take off the blot¬ 
ting paper and rag from each care¬ 
fully, so as not to pull up the sea¬ 
weed. 

Most seaweeds are gummy and 
stick to the paper, but some hard 
ones need a little mucilage. When 
well dried the papers may be neatly 
arranged according to their sizes on 
the pages of an album. If the speci¬ 
mens are large only one can be put 
on a page, but if they are small, 
they may be placed in many pretty 
ways. A little mucilage under the 
corners of each paper will hold them 
securely. 

Seaweeds belong to the lowest 
class of flowerless plants. They 
do not have seeds, but grow from 
spores, as do lichens. 

The word seaweed is made up of 


the Anglo-Saxon see, the sea, and 
wedd, weed. 

SEED, In the article Fruits, 
which should be read before this, it 
is told that the fruit of a plant is its 
seed-holder. A seed, or the part 
from which a new plant grows, is 
made up of its coat or skin and of 
its kernel, or part inside the skin. 
The kernel is made up of the embryo 
and of the albumen, when there is 
any. The embryo is the part of the 
seed which grows, the baby plant. 
The albumen is a stock of food 
laid up for the embryo to live upon 
before it is old enough to draw food 
from the earth. 

Soak a grain of Indian corn until 
you can take the skin off. You will 
then see a thick lumpy body in the 
middle and reaching down to the 
small end, which can easily be tak¬ 



en out with the finger nail, if the 
grain is soaked enough. The part 
taken out is the embryo, and the 
other part from which it was taken 
is the albumen. The parts can be 
seen in the picture, where I shows 
a grain of corn cut through flat-wise, 
2 shows the same cut through the 
other way, and 3 shows the embryo 
taken out of another grain whole, 
and placed beside the one cut 
through so as to match the parts. 
In this r is the radicle (Latin radix , 
root) or part which grows into the 
root, p is the plumule (Latin pluma , 
a feather) or bud which grows up 
into the stem, and c is the seed-leaf, 
or cotyledon, which forms the first 
leaf of the plant. A seed of the 
morning glory, cut through and 
looked at through a magnifying 






SEED 


544 


SEED 


glass, is shown in the next picture. 
In i the embryo is seen whole and 
flatwise in the seed ; in 2 it is seen 
edgewise, lying in the albumen, 
which is all around it; in 3 it is seen 
taken out of the albumen and spread 
out flat; and in 4 its two leaves are 
separated. The radicle is shown at 
r, and the seed-leaves or cotyledons 



Seed of Morning Glory. 


at c c. The plumule cannot be 
seen. Both the corn and the morn¬ 
ing glory seed have albumen to feed 
the young plant on, but they differ in 
another way : the corn has but one 
seed-leaf or cotyledon, and the morn¬ 
ing glory has two. This is a very 
important difference, which will be 
told about hereafter. 



Seed of Bean. 


The food for the baby plant is not 
always stored up in this way outside 
of the embryo, but it often forms a 
part of the embryo itself. In such 
cases the coat or skin of the seed 
has nothing in it but the embryo. 
If we take the skin off from a soaked 
bean, we shall see that it is made up 
of two thick pieces joined at the up¬ 


per end by a little stem, as shown in 
1 in the third picture. It will be 
seen better by spreading the parts 
out flat, as in 2. These two thick 
parts, marked e e , are the seed- 
leaves or cotyledons, a is the radicle, 
and c the plumule. The cotyledons 
are thick and heavy because they 
have stored up in them the food 
for the baby plant. When the bean 
sprouts, they come up out of the 
ground and turn green, but after the 
root and the new leaves have drawn 
enough food from them they wither 
and fall off. The seeds of the 
cherry, chestnut, beech, and almond 
grow in the same way ; but in the 
pea, acorn, and horse-chestnut, the 
cotyledons do not come out of the 
ground. 

Embryos are divided into two 
classes : those with one cotyledon 
or seed-leaf, and those with two co¬ 
tyledons or seed-leaves. The first 
kind are called monocotyledonous, 
which means with one cotyledon, 
and the second dicotyledonous, 
which means with two cotyledons. 
These are hard words, but they 
should be learned, as they are found 
in all botanies, and are necessary to 
describe plants. The plants which 
grow from the first kind of embryos 
are named monocotyledons, and 
those which grow from the second 
kind are called dicotyledons. 

Seeds do not all stay where they 
drop, but are scattered in different 
ways. Some seeds are fitted with 
thin wings, like maple and pine 
seeds, so that the wind easily blows 
them. The seeds of the dandelion 
have a long thin stem, at the other 
end of which is a tuft of fine thready 
down, and those of the thistle are also 
fitted with down, so that they blow 
about easily and are carried great 
distances. Other seeds float away 
on water, or are carried away by 
birds or in the wool of sheep and 
other animals, and dropped in places 
where they sprout and grow. The 
burs which often stick to clothes, 
and to the manes and tails of horses. 


i 







SEWING-MACHINE 


545 


SEWING-MACHINE 


are seed-holders whose seeds are 
thus scattered. Some seeds too, 
like those of mosses and ferns, are 
so small and light that they are 
blown away by the gentlest breeze. 

The word seed is from the Anglo- 
Saxon seed, seed. 

SEWING-MACHINE. The first 
sewing-machine which would sew 
cloth was made by an Englishman 
named Thomas Saint in 1790; 
though a machine for embroidering 
had been made some years before 
(1770). In the first part of this cen¬ 
tury several other machines were 
made, in England and in the United 
States, but none of them came into 
use. In 1830 a sewing-machine 
was made in France by a man named 
Thimonnier, which was used in 
sewing clothes for the army. Eighty 
of these machines were broken to 
pieces at one time by a mob in Paris, 
because the tailors feared that they 
were going to do all the work and 
thus take away their bread, and many 
others were afterward broken, and 
the maker died a poor man. About 
1833 an American named Walter 
Hunt, living in New York City, 
made several sewing-machines 
which worked well, but he did not 
take out a patent—that is, he did 
not get from the government papers 
giving him the sole right to make 
them. In 1846 Elias Howe, also 
an American, having been born in 
Massachusetts in 1819, made a 
sewing-machine which in many 
things was like that made by Hunt, 
and got a patent on it; and from 
this have grown all the different 
kinds of sewing-machines now in 
use, so that Howe has the name of 
being the father of the sewing-ma¬ 
chine. 

The Howe machine uses a needle 
with an eye near the point, instead 
of at the larger end, as in the com¬ 
mon needle. The thread, carried 
through the cloth by this needle, 
forms a loop under the cloth through 
which a shuttle (see Loom) is made 
to pass. The shuttle has in it a 


bobbin of thread which unwinds 
as it passes through the loop, and 
the thread thus put through forms 
what is called the lock stitch. The 
machine made by Hunt had the same 
kind of needle, and made the same 
stitch, but it is generally thought 
that Howe did not know of it when 
he made his machine. Almost all 
the best sewing-machines sew the 
lock stitch, although all do not make 
it just alike, some of them not using 
any shuttle, but passing the thread 
through the loop in another way. 
Among the lock-stitch machines are 
the Singer, the Wheeler & Wilson, 
the Howe, the Domestic, and the 
Weed. The Wilcox & Gibbs ma¬ 
chine sews what is called the twisted- 
loop stitch. 

The way in which the shuttle lock¬ 
stitch sewing-machine works can be 
seen in the following pictures of the 


/ 



Shuttle. 

Singer machine, of which more are 
sold every year than of any other 
kind. The first picture shows the 
shuttle, in which A is the case or 
outside part, B the bobbin or spool 
on which the thread is wound, and 
C the thread-guide. When the bob¬ 
bin is put into the shuttle-case the 
end of the thread is put under the 
little bar below the bobbin, then 
carried over the top of the bobbin 
and through the little holes seen on 
the upper side, and finally under the 
thread-guide, all of which is well 
shown in the picture. The thread 
is put through enough of the little 
holes to make the right “ tension” 
—that is, to make the thread draw 
just tight enough to sew well. If it 
were not for this the thread would 
pull out too fast and be too loose, so 
that the stitches would not be tight 







SEWING-MACHINE 


546 


SEWING-MACHINE 


enough. The thread-guide keeps 
the thread from knotting and makes 
it draw straight. 

In the second picture, the shuttle 
A is seen in the shuttle-carrier E, in 
which it is carried backward and for¬ 


ward in the machine. The point of 
the shuttle is shown just going into 
the loop made by the thread in the 
needle. Every lock-stitch sewing- 
machine sews with two threads, one 
in the needle and the other in the 
shuttle. The needle 
thread is wound on 
a bobbin or spool 
above it, and is put 
through the eye, 
which is near the 
point, as in the Howe 
machine. When the 
needle comes down 
the thread is carried 
through the cloth 
close against the 
side of the needle, 
but when it begins 
to move upward, the 
thread, which is 
loose, is caught by 
the cloth and made to bulge out, so 
as to form a loop, as in the second 
picture. The machinery is so made 
that the shuttle-carrier moves for¬ 
ward the very moment the loop is 
formed, and the shuttle having a 


sharp point forces its way through, 
and carries its thread through the 
loop of the needle thread. The ten¬ 
sion and the thread-guide let out just 
thread enough from the bobbin of 
the shuttle to form a stitch, and as 
the needle thread is at the 
same time drawn up, the 
stitch is drawn tight in the 
cloth. 

After the stitch is tight¬ 
ened the shuttle goes a lit¬ 
tle further forward, and 
this unreels enough thread 
from its bobbin to make 
the next stitch. This is 
shown in the third picture, 
where the shuttle is seen, 
after having passed through 
the loop, ready to go back. 
This it does while the 
needle is coming down 
again, so that the instant 
the loop is made it shall be 
ready to pass through it as 
before. In the fourth picture is shown 
the lock stitch thus made, but much 
enlarged. The stitch is even and ex¬ 
actly alike on both sides of the 
cloth, the point where the two threads 
lock together being within the cloth. 


Many of the sewing-machines for 
sewing cloth can be made to do 
other work than plain sewing, such 
as hemming, felling, ruffling, cord¬ 
ing, embroidering, and making but¬ 
tonholes ; and there are also sewing- 




Shuttle after passing through the Loop. 





















































































SHAD 


547 


SHARK 


machines made for sewing the up¬ 
pers and the soles of shoes, har¬ 
nesses, carpets, books, etc. 

More than half a million sewing- 
machines are made in the United 
States every year, many of which are 



Lock Stitch. 


sent to the different countries of 
Europe, and to Mexico, and to Cen¬ 
tral and South America. 

The word sewing is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon siwian, to sew. Machine 
is from the Latin machina , a ma¬ 
chine. 

SHAD, a common fish of the her¬ 
ring family, much esteemed for food. 
American shad come from the south 
every spring and go up the northern 
rivers to spawn. They reach South 
Carolina in January, and the coast 
of New York and Massachusetts 
from the end of March to the end of 
April. They are caught in drift and 
stake nets mostly at or near the 
mouths of the rivers, as their flavor 
is better near the salt water. Shad 
sold in the New York markets come 
mostly from the Delaware and Hud¬ 
son rivers, but some fine ones are 
brought from the Connecticut river. 
They are usually eaten fresh, but 
some are split and salted. 

Shad weigh generally two to six 
pounds. They are bluish on the back, 
light copper color on the sides and 
silvery below. Their flesh is very 
sweet, but is filled with small bones. 
The eggs or spawn of the shad, 
commonly called the roe, is also un¬ 
usually good, and is much sought 
after for the table. The shad will 
bite in fresh water at a hook baited 
with a fly, and give the angler good 
sport. 

The word shad is from the pro¬ 
vincial German schcide , shad. 

SHADDOCK, a fruit of the same 
family with the orange and 
LEMON. It grows wild in China 


and the East Indies, but is now cul¬ 
tivated in the West Indies, whence 
the shaddocks seen in our markets 
are brought. The fruit is pale yel¬ 
low and sometimes as large as a 
child’s head. It is not worth much 
for eating, but makes good pre¬ 
serves. 

The shaddock is named from Cap¬ 
tain Shaddock, an Englishman, who 
first brought it from Asia to the 
West Indies. 

SHAGREEN, a kind of leather 
made from the skins of horses, wild 
asses, and camels, and grained so 
as to have on it little pimples or 
grains. It is mostly made at Astra¬ 
khan, in Russia, and in other places 
in the East. The skins are stretched 
very tightly and wet with water, and 
while soft they are sprinkled on the 
hair side with the hard, round seeds 
of a plant which grows in the East. 
The seeds are then pressed into the 
skin and it is dried. When dry the 
skins are beaten to get the seeds 
out, and they are then shaved down 
on the other side almost to the dents 
made by the seeds. When the skins 
are wet again the dents swell up on 
the shaved side and make little 
grains all over it. The skins are 
then dyed. Shagreen was once 
much used for covering sword scab¬ 
bards, and it is still used for cover¬ 
ing instrument cases, small boxes, 
etc. 

The word shagreen is from the 
Persian sagrz, the leather of a horse’s 
back. 

SHARK, a large sea fish found in 
almost all the oceans of the world. 
There are as many as a hundred 
kinds, some of which are six or 
seven times as long as a man, while 
some are not more than a yard long. 
Sharks have very large mouths, with 
several rows of sharp three-cornered 
teeth. They are mostly flesh-eaters, 
and live on living and dead animals 
and on other fish. The white 
shark, or “man-eater,” one of the 
largest and fiercest kinds, and which 
is found in all the large oceans, will 









SHEEP 


548 


SHEEP 


cut a man in two at a single bite, 
and one has been known to swallow 
a man whole. All sharks like the 
flesh of a negro better than that of 
a white man. One of the wicked 
amusements on board of slave ships 
was to hang the body of a dead ne¬ 
gro to the bowsprit and watch the 
sharks jump for it. It is said they 
would often catch it when hung 
more than twenty feet above the 
water. Sharks are very greedy and 
will often follow ships for days to eat 
the waste food thrown overboard. 

The sharks commonly found along 
the Atlantic coasts of the United 
States are the mackerel shark, 
which feeds on mackerel, and which 


is about as long as a man ; the gray 
shark, which is sometimes longer 
than a man ; and the dog fish. The 
mackerel shark is often caught for 
the sake of its liver, which yields six 
or seven gallons of oil. The skin 
of the shark is rough ; it is some¬ 
times used by joiners instead of fine 
sand-paper, and the hilts of swords 
are often covered with it. Large 
numbers of sharks are caught in the 
Indian Ocean for the sake of their 
fins, out of which the Chinese make 
soup. In Norway and Iceland all 
kinds of sharks are eaten, the fish 
being hung up fora year to cure, like 
hams, to make the flesh tender. 
The small kinds of sharks are sold 



White Shark or “ Man-Eater ” 


in the Paris markets, and the dog¬ 
fish is dried and smoked for food in 
several countries. 

The word shark comes from the 
Greek word karcharzas, a shark, 
which is made from fcarcharos, 
sharp-pointed, meaning their teeth. 

SHEEP. It is not known where 
the sheep first came from, but wild 
sheep are found in many parts of 
the world. There is one kind in 
America, called the Rocky Mountain 
sheep or big horn, but none of our 
tame kinds have descended from 
it. The first tame sheep in the 
United States were brought from 
England to Virginia in 1609. These 
were common sheep, but now most 
of the best breeds in the world are 


raised in this country. Some sheep 
have finer wool than others, but their 
meat is not so good as that of the 
coarser-wooled kinds. Among fine- 
wool sheep are the Merino, French, 
Saxon, and Silesian; and among 
coarse-wool ones are the Southdown, 
Cotswokl, and Leicester. 

The sheep is one of the most valu¬ 
able of animals. Its flesh is among 
the best of foods, its fat makes good 
tallow, and in some countries the 
milk is much used both for drinking 
and for making cheese. From its 
wool is woven woollen and worsted 
cloths, and from its skin is made 
leather, parchment, and vellum. 

Sheep belong to the order rumi- 
nantia , or cud-chewing animals. 












SHELLS 


549 


SHELLS 


The word sheep is from the Anglo- 
Saxon seep or sceap , sheep. In Ger¬ 
man it is Sckaf. 

SHELLS. Shells are the coverings 
of the animals called mollusks. 
They are not outside skeletons, like 
the shells of turtles, but are only the 
houses in which the animals live. 
Most mollusks need such a cover¬ 
ing, because their bodies are very 
soft and tender. If you look at an 
oyster which has just been opened 
you will see a delicate soft skin lining 
the shell and covering all the soft 
parts of the animal. This skin, 
which is called the mantle, is the 
part which makes the shell. Shells 
are made up of lime (CALCIUM car¬ 
bonate), mixed with more or less of 
animal matter called ALBUMEN. 
The mantle takes up lime from sea¬ 
water and builds it up in thin layers 
all around the body of the animal. 
The edge of the mantle does the 
most of this work, and the shell 
therefore grows by having new layers 
of lime and albumen added to its 
outer edge. New layers are also 
made all round on the inside, and 
the shell thus grows thicker and 
heavier. Mollusks which lead quiet 
lives, usually lying in one place on 
the bottom of the sea, have the thick¬ 
est shells, and those which move 
around much generally have thin 
shells. In some shells there is more 
lime than albumen, making them 
hard like porcelain, and such shells 
are usually called porcelain shells. 
In others there are layers of lime 
and layers of albumen between them, 
and these shells are called pearly 
shells, because they shine like 
mother of pearl. 

Shells are usually divided into two 
classes, univalves or those which 
have only one part, such as snail and 
conch shells, and bivalves, or those 
made up of two parts joined together 
with a hinge, like oyster and clam 
shells. Most of the univalve shells 
are porcelain shells, and most of the 
bivalves are pearly shells. Univalve 
shells are of many different forms, 


some being shaped like harps, some 
like spindles, helmets, elephants’ 
tusks, shields, boats, spiral stair¬ 
cases, caps of liberty, and some like 
spiders. There are not so many 
singular shapes among bivalves, 
most of them being plain, like oys¬ 
ter, clam, and mussel shells ; but 
there are a few odd forms, such as 
the hammer oyster, which when shut 
up looks like a hammer, and the 
razor shell, which is long and nar¬ 
row like the blade of a razor. Shells 
often change their form in growing, 
so that those of the same animal at 
different ages are of different shapes. 
Some shells are very large : the 
giant clam, found in the East Indies 
and in Australia, is sometimes near¬ 
ly as long as a man and very heavy, 
the two parts often weighing four or 
five hundred pounds. A pair of 
these great shells are kept in the 
church of St. Sulpice, Paris, where 
they are used to hold holy water. 

Shells have a great many uses. 
Many are kept in cabinets on ac¬ 
count of the beauty of their colors 
and shape, and rare kinds have often 
sold for large prices. They have 
also been used as ornaments, and 
rude nations often make them into 
money. The wampum used by the 
North American Indians for money, 
and for ornamenting belts and 
clothes, was made of the shells of 
the quahaug clam. Shells are some¬ 
times made into beautiful vases, 
baskets, and table tops, and in the 
East even wreaths and bouquets 
are formed out of different-colored 
shells. The uses of mother of pearl 
are told about in the article Moth¬ 
er of Pearl. Many univalve 
shells, especially conch shells, are 
cut into cameos for jewellery. The 
conch shells most used are those 
called bull’s mouth and black helmet, 
in which the layers are of different 
colors. The upper layer is white or 
yellowish, and in this the head or 
other figure of the cameo is cut; and 
the second layer, which is nearly 
black, is made into a background. 





SHINGLE 


550 


SHIP 


If you look at a shell cameo, you will 
see how this is. The white part is 
carved into the form wanted, by 
means of fine steel tools made of 
wire and by files, great care being 
taken not to cut into the black layer 
in taking the white off, because its 
natural polish is finer than any which 
can be given to it, and if it is 
scratched the whole layer has to be 
cut off. 

The pink conch shell, brought 
from Panama and the West India 
Islands, is made into beautiful jew¬ 
ellery which looks some like pink 
coral, but is not so costly. The part 
used is the inner lining of the shell, 
which is the same substance as the 
pink pearls, which are found in this 
kind of shell. 

Common shells are used for mak¬ 
ing roads, are burned into lime for 
making MORTAR and CEMENT, and 
for spreading upon land as a manure. 
Shell sand, found along sea shores, 
and made by the crumbling up of 
shells, .is also used for putting on 
land which has too little lime in it. 

The word shell is from the Anglo- 
Saxon seel/, shell. 

SHINGLE, a thin slab of wood for 
covering roofs. Shingles are made 
out of various kinds of wood, such 
as pine, cypress, cedar, chestnut, 
and oak, but pine and cypress ones 
are the best. They are made 
thinner at one end than at the other, 
so that, when nailed in rows on a 
roof, the thick ends of one row may 
lap over the thin ends of the one 
next below it, and thus shed water. 
Shingles are split, sawed, or shaved 
off from blocks of wood by machin¬ 
ery. Some are made by hand, being 
either split out rough, or shaved 
smooth with a drawing knife. Most 
shingles are sawn in mills called 
shingle mills, and put up in bundles 
for sale. 

The word shingle is from the Latin 
scindula, shingle, which is from scan - 
dere , to climb, and shingles are so 
named because they are put on roofs 
like little steps, one above the other. 


SHIP, the general name of any 
large sea-going vessel ; but particu¬ 
larly a vessel with three masts, all 
of which are rigged with square 
sails, or sails on yards. A ship is 
made up of the hull, or body, which 
sits in the water ; the spars, which 
include the masts, yards, bowsprit, 
and other timbers above the hull ; 
the rigging, or ropes, chains, etc., 
of which there are two kinds, the 
standing - rigging, which supports 
the masts, and the running rigging, 
by which the sails are set and 
furled ; and the sails. 

The hull consists of the bow or 
forward part, the waist or middle 
part, and the stern, or after part. 
The upper deck, which is open to 
the sky, is called the spar-deck. Its 
raised sides are named bulwarks 
(from French boulevard , rampart). 
The part of the spar deck forward 
of the first mast is called the fore¬ 
castle (the fore castle ; in former 
times ships had a castle at each end, 
in which the fighting men were 
placed), the part between that and 
the next mast the waist, and the 
part back of that the quarter-deck. 
Next below the spar-deck is the 
main-deck, and below that, in large 
men-of-war, is the gun-deck. The 
hulls of sailing vessels are usually 
built of wood, but steamships are 
largely built of iron. 

The front mast of a ship is called 
the foremast, the next or middle one 
the mainmast, and the hindmost one 
the mizzenmast. Each mast is 
made up of four pieces or parts, 
because no trees could be found tall 
enough and at the same time strong 
enough to make it of one piece. 
The different parts, which are bound 
together with strong iron bands, are 
called by different names, the second 
part of each being called the topmast, 
the third part the topgallant-mast, 
and the fourth or highest part the roy¬ 
al mast. Thus, the foremast is made 
up of the lower part, the fore-top¬ 
mast, the fore-topgallant-mast, and 
the fore-royal-mast ; the mainmast 


































































































































. 

















































. 












SHIP-WORM 


553 


SHIP-WORM 


masts, which are named foremast and 
mainmast, are each in two parts, a 
lower mast and a topmast. The prin¬ 
cipal sails are the mainsail a, on the 
mainmast, the foresail b , on the fore¬ 
mast, and the jib c, forward of the 
foremast. The mainsail and the 
foresail are not stretched between 
yards, as in square rigged vessels, 
but between a gaff and a boom. 
The gaff is the wooden piece on the 
top of each of those sails, and the 
boom the similar, but longer, piece 
at the bottom. Mainsails always 
have a gaff and a boom, but foresails 
sometimes have no boom, and are 
then called lug-foresails. Schooners 
also carry, above the mainsail and 
the foresail, smaller three-cornered 
sails, called gaff-topsails, because 
they are fastened to the gaffs, and a 
second jib d, called the flying jib. 
Sometimes a schooner has a square 
topsail, and some¬ 
times a topgallant- 
sail, stretched be¬ 
tween yards, at the 
top of the foremast, 
and is then called a 
topsail schooner. A 
three - masted 
schooner is a long 
schooner with three masts. The 
schooner is wholly an American ves¬ 
sel, the first one ever made having 
been built by Captain Andrew Rob¬ 
inson, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, 
about 1713. Sloops are smaller than 
schooners and have but one mast. 
Their sails are a jib, a mainsail, and 
a gaff-topsail ; and some have a 
square topsail, rigged in the same 
way with that on a schooner. A sloop 
of war is a vessel rigged either as a 
ship, a brig, or a schooner, and carry¬ 
ing 18 to 32 guns. A yacht is a ves¬ 
sel used only for pleasure, racing, 
etc. Yachts are usually rigged either 
as schooners or sloops. 

The word ship is from the Anglo- 
Saxon scipy ship. 

SHIP-WORM. This ANIMAL, 
which is rightly called the teredo, was 
once thought to be a worm, but it 


is not a worm, though its body looks 
long and worm-like. It is covered 
with a sort of sheath or shelly coat, 
and is a kind of MOLLUSK. It is 
called ship-worm because it bores 
holes into ship timbers, and often 
injures them so much that they will 
crumble at the touch. Not only 
ships’ timbers but all other kinds of 
wood work under water are eaten 
by it. Once the coast of Holland 
was threatened with a deluge, be¬ 
cause the ship-worm ate the piles 
of the dykes which kept out the sea, 
and it cost a great deal of money to 
repair them. 

The ship-worm is grayish white, 
and is generally six or eight inches 
long. Its shape can be seen best in 
the picture. The larger end, which 
is wrongly called its head, because 
this kind of mollusk has no head, is 
the one with which it bores. The 


other end is divided into what may 
be called two tails. When the larva 
or young shipworm is first hatched, 
it swims around looking for some 
wood in which it may bury itself. 
When it finds a piece to suit it, it 
begins to cut a hole. It is not 
known exactly how it works, but it 
has strong MUSCLES in front, and as 
the wood is softened with water, it 
is supposed that the moving of these 
muscles takes out the wood little by 
little. It feeds on the wood as it 
goes, and when it is about half way 
in it covers the sides of the hole with 
a kind of slimy matter which hardens 
into a shell. Each teredo makes a 
hole for itself and never cuts into 
another hole, though the spaces be¬ 
tween are often so thin that the 
wood is cut up like a honey comb, 
and a little pressure on the outside 



Ship-Worm. 





SHOE 


554 


SHOT AND SHELL 


will crush it. Ships’ bottoms are 
covered usually with copper plates 
to save their timbers and planks 
from these animals. 

The word ship-worm is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon scip , ship, and 
wyrm, worm. 

SHOE, a covering for the foot, 
usually made of leather. If it cov¬ 
ers only the sole or a small part of 
the foot, it is called a sandal or slip¬ 
per ; and if it covers a part of the 
leg it is called a boot. The soft 
buckskin shoes of the American In¬ 
dians are called in their language 
moccasins. In some parts of 
Europe poor people wear wooden 
shoes called sabots. In Japan com¬ 
mon people wear shoes made of 
plaited straw, and in South America 
of plaited hemp and grass. 

Shoes are largely made in the 
United States, chiefly in Massachu¬ 
setts, New Hampshire, and Maine, 
but most of the finer kinds are made 
in New York, Philadelphia, and 
other large cities. Fine shoes are 
made mostly by hand, but the com¬ 
moner kinds are largely made by 
machinery. Some machines sew 
the uppers and some the soles, and 
others peg soles. The pegging ma¬ 
chine makes its own pegs as it | 
works, and can easily peg on the 
soles of two pairs of women’s shoes 
in a minute. The pegs are made 
out of white birch wood, which is 
fed to the machine in strips. The 
sole sewing machine can sew on the 
soles of eighty shoes in an hour. 
All shoes, whether made by hand or 
by machinery, are shaped over a 
wooden form called a last, of the 
shape of the foot. Almost all shoes 
for women and children are made 
by machines, but the finest kinds of 
men’s shoes are sewed by hand. 

The word shoe is from the Anglo- 
Saxon scoh , shoe. 

SHOT and SHELL. Shot means 
rightly any thing fired from a gun or 
cannon with gunpowder, but hollow 
shot made to burst after being fired 
are generally called shells. The 


balls used in rifles are commonly 
called bullets, and are told about 
under that name, so in this article 
only small shot used by sportsmen 
in shot guns or guns for hunting, 
and large shot and shell used in 
cannon will be described. 

Small Shot are not cast in moulds 
like bullets, but are made by drop- 
ing melted lead from the top of 
igh towers called shot-towers. 

The lead of which they are made 
has a little arsenic mixed with it, 
which makes it softer and causes it 
to take the round form more easily. 
When mixed, it is poured into moulds 
and made into bars, and these are 
hoisted up to the top of the shot- 
tower. Some shot-towers are as 
high as a church steeple ; they have 
to be much higher for making large 
shot than for making small shot. 
At the top of the tower is a furnace 
in which the lead is again melted, 
and it is then poured on to iron 
plates full of little round holes, so 
placed that the lead after going 
through the holes will fall down to 
the bottom of the tower. The shot 
are made round and hard by falling 
through the air, and are cooled by 
dropping into a cistern of water at 
I the bottom. They are then dried, 
separated into different sizes by 
sifting them through sieves, and 
polished by turning them round in a 
kind of barrel with some powdered 
black lead. Sometimes the lead 
is poured down deep pits in the 
earth, instead of from towers. At 
Newcastle, in England, a deserted 
coal-pit is thus used. 

Cannon Shot. When cannon were 
first made, round stones were used 
for shot, but after a while balls were 
made out of metal, generally lead 
or iron ; now shot and shell are 
made of iron or steel. Cannon 
shot are of two kinds, those to be 
used in smooth-bore guns—that is, 
guns whose barrels are smooth in¬ 
side, and those to be used in rifled 
guns, or guns whose insides are cut 
in grooves, as told about under 







SHOT AND SHELL 


555 


SHOT AND SHELL 


Rifle. Shot for smooth-bore guns 
are made round, and those for 
rifled guns are long and pointed. 
Long shot cannot be fired very well 
in smooth-bore guns, because they 
need grooves to make them go 
straight, but round shot can be fired 
in rifled guns. There are three 
kinds of shot used in smooth-bore 
cannon : i, Shot; 2, Shell ; and 3, 
Case-Shot. 



Round Shot as Cast. 


1. Shot are round balls of solid 
iron, cast in sand. In old times 
only one ball was cast at a time, 
and the shot were rougher and less 
perfect than they are now made. 
Round shot are now cast four or five 
at a time, joined together as shown 
in the picture, and afterward turned 
smooth in a lathe. 

2. Shell, commonly called bombs, 
are like round shot, but are hollow, 
and have a hole opening into the 
inside. They are cast with a core 
of sand, which when taken out 
leaves a hollow space. This space 
is filled with powder and has a 
fuse or slow match in the hole. 
The shell is put into the gun with 
the fuse toward the muzzle or 
mouth, and when the gun is fired 
the flame of the gunpowder runs 
over the top of the shell and lights 
the fuse in front. The fuse, which 
burns while the shell is going 
through the air, is made just long 
enough to burn down to the pow¬ 
der by the time the shell reaches 
the place it is aimed at, and the 
shell then bursts. Such a fuse is 
therefore called a time fuse. 
Another kind is the percussion fuse, 
which explodes when the shell 
strikes. Shell to be fired from long 
guns commonly have a round block 
of wood called a sabot fastened to 
the back end to keep the shell 
straight in the gun, for if it should 


turn over so as to bring the fuse be¬ 
hind it might burst before leaving 
the gun ; but shell fired from mor¬ 
tars, a very short kind of CANNON, 
do not need any sabot. The form of 
the sabot can be seen in the fourth 
picture. 

3. Case Shot are made up of 
small shot in a case, or envelope of 
some kind. There are three kinds 
in common use : grape shot, can¬ 
ister shot, and shrapnel. 

A grape shot is made of several 
small cast iron balls, so fastened 
together that they may be loaded in 
a gun all at once. In the United 
States nine balls are used, put to¬ 
gether between iron plates in three 
layers, as shown the picture, Fig. 
2. The firing of the gun bursts the 
plates apart, and the balls scatter 
as soon as they leave the gun. 
Grape shot are used in attacking 
forts, but are not fired much in bat¬ 
tles in the field. 

A canister shot is made up of a 
sheet-iron or tin can filled with 
small iron or lead balls, the spaces 
between them being usually packed 



Canister Shot. Grape Shot. 


with sawdust. The canister bursts 
as soon as it leaves the gun and the 
balls are thus scattered and do great 
execution among large masses of 
men. In the picture a canister shot 
is shown with one side of the can 
partly cut away, so that the balls can 
be seen. 

A shrapnel shot is made up of a 
cast-iron shell filled with musket 
balls, into which melted sulphur or 
resin is poured so as to fill up all the 

















SHOT AND SHELL 


556 


SHOULDER-STRAP 


spaces between. This hardens and 
makes the balls into a solid mass. 
A hole is then bored down through 
the sulphur and bullets of a size just 
large enough to hold gunpowder 
enough to burst the shell. Shrapnel, 
which are named after Colonel Shrap¬ 
nel of the British army, who made 
the first ones about 1808, are used 
in both smooth-bore and rifled can¬ 
non. Those for smooth-bore guns 
are made round, and are commonly 
called spherical .(round) case shot. 
They are fitted, like shell, with a 
sabot, as in the picture, and are 
fired by a fuse, which is made just 
long enough to burn down to the 
powder in a given time. In field 
battles shrapnel shot are fired at 
large bodies of men and are timed 
to burst a short distance before 



Spherical Case Shot. 

reaching them ; the bullets and the 
pieces of shell, which keep on in the 
same way, are thus spread out and 
made to kill many more than a sin¬ 
gle shot would. 

The shot used in rifled guns are 
commonly made long and pointed, 
much like a sugar loaf in shape, 
There are four kinds : 1, Shot ; 2, 
Shell ; 3, Battering Shell ; and 4, 
Shrapnel. 

1. Shot are cast solid and then 
turned smooth and even in a lathe. 
They are made in different ways to 
suit the different kinds of rifling in 
guns. 

2. Shell are cast, like round shell, 
with a sand core which comes out 
leaving the shell hollow. This is 
loaded with gunpowder, and fired 
either with a time ora percussion fuse. 


3. Battering shell are cast much 
like common shell, but are much 
thicker and have only a small hol¬ 
low in them. Large ones may be 
stronger than solid shot, because the 
hollow in them makes them cool 
more evenly when cast. These are 
used for battering walls and for 
firing at iron-clad ships. 

4. Shrapnel are made much like 
spherical case shot, differing only in 
their shape. The small balls are 
put into a hollow in the middle, and 
the shell is burst by means of a fuse, 
which is lighted when the gun is 
fired. 

In former times many other 
kinds of shot and shell were used, 
most of which are now old-fash¬ 
ioned. Among these were the chain 
shot, made up of two cannon balls 
joined by a chain, used to cut the 
masts and rigging of vessels, and 
bar shot, joined by an iron bar in¬ 
stead of a chain. Carcasses are 
shells filled with some substance 
which will burn furiously, and 
which have holes in them through 
which the fire can blaze out and 
set buildings on fire. They are 
sometimes thrown into cities and 
towns to burn them. Hand gren¬ 
ades are small shells or bombs filled 
with gunpowder, and having a time 
or percussion fuse. They are thrown 
by hand, and are used especially in 
defending forts to throw among 
masses of men who are attacking. 
They are also used in sea fights to 
throw on to the decks of vessels, 
and assassins have sometimes tried 
to kill sovereigns with them. In 
1858 an Italian named Orsini, with 
several others, tried to kill Louis 
Napoleon and the Empress Eugenie 
by throwing three grenades under 
their carriage. Many people were 
killed and wounded, but the Em¬ 
peror and Empress were unharmed. 

The word shot is from the Anglo- 
Saxon scedtan , to shoot. Shell is 
from the Anglo-Saxon scell, shell. 

SHOULDER-STRAP, a strap worn 
on the shoulder by officers of the 











SHOULDER-STRAP 


557 


SHOULDER-STRAP 


army and navy to mark their rank. 
Shoulder-straps are worn only by 
commissioned officers, that is, offi¬ 
cers who have their commission or 
title from the head of the govern¬ 
ment of a country. Under officers, 
such as sergeants and corporals in 
the army, and gunners and boat¬ 
swains in the navy, who are com¬ 
monly called warrant officers, be¬ 


cause they get their power from pa¬ 
pers called warrants, which are 
given them by commissioned offi¬ 
cers, usually have their rank told by 
marks on the collars and sleeves of 
their coats. 

The Commissioned Officers of the 

army are as follows : general, lieu¬ 
tenant-general, major-general, brig¬ 
adier-general, colonel, lieutenant- 





General. 



Lieutenant-General. 



Major-General 



Brigadier-General. 




Colonel. 


I .ieuten an t-Colonel. 
(Silver Leaves.) 


Major. 
(Gold Leaves.) 




Captain. 




First Lieutenant. 


Second Lieutenant 


Shoulder-Straps of the United States Army. 


colonel, major, captain, first-lieuten¬ 
ant, and second-lieutenant. Of these, 
the general, lieutenant-general, ma¬ 
jor-general, and brigadier-general 
are called general officers, because 
they command bodies of men larger 
than regiments ; and all the others 
regimental officers, because they 
command only regiments and parts 
of regiments. 


The commissioned officers of the 
navy are as follows : admiral, vice- 
admiral, rear-admiral, commodore, 
captain, commander, lieutenant-com¬ 
mander, lieutenant, master, ensign. 

Uniform of Army. All officers of 
the army wear a double-breasted 
frock coat of dark-blue cloth, and 
all general officers wear trowsers of 
dark-blue cloth without any stripe 












































SHOULDER-STRAP 


553 


SHOULDER-STRAP 


on the sides. Regimental officers 
wear light-blue cloth trowsers, with 
a stripe on the sides one and a half 
inches wide ; the stripes being col¬ 
ored according to the part of the 
army the officer belongs to : in the 
infantry, dark blue ; artillery, red ; 
cavalry, yellow. For common wear 
a sack coat of dark-blue cloth may 
be worn by officers. Common sol¬ 
diers wear dark-blue basques faced j 


with sky blue in the infantry, red in 
the artillery, and yellow in the cav¬ 
alry ; and sky-blue trowsers without 
stripes ; but sergeants wear a stripe 
one inch wide and corporals a stripe 
one half inch wide, dark blue in the 
infantry, red in the artillery, and yel¬ 
low in the cavalry. General officers 
wear black ostrich feathers in their 
hats, and regimental officers cock 
feathers ; those of the infantry are 





Commander. 
(Silver Leaves.) 



Lieutenant-Commander. Lieutenant. 

(Gold Leaves.) 


Shoulder-Straps of the United States Navy. 


white, and of the artillery red. Regi¬ 
mental cavalry officers wear yellow 
horse-hair plumes, and light horse- 
artillery, red norse-hair plumes. 

Shoulder-Straps of Army. The 
cloth of shoulder-straps in the army 
differs in the different parts : for gen¬ 
eral officers it is dark blue with a 
gold embroidered border ; for regi¬ 
mental officers of infantry, light blue 
with gold border ; of artillery, red 
with gold border ; and of cavalry, 


yellow with gold border. The marks 
of rank, as shown in the pictures, 
are put on the cloth inside the 
gold border, and are as follows : 
general of the army, two silver stars 
with the arms of the United States 
between them ; lieutenant-general, 
three silver stars; major-general, 
two silver stars ; brigadier-general, 
one silver star; colonel, a silver 
spread eagle; lieutenant-colonel, 
two silver leaves ; major, two gold 







































































SHOULDER-STRAP 


559 


SILICON 


leaves ; captain, two silver bars, at 
each end ; first-lieutenant, one sil¬ 
ver bar at each end ; second-lieuten¬ 
ant, plain strap without marks. 

Uniform of Navy. All officers of the 
navy wear, when on duty, a double- 
breasted frock coat of navy-blue 
cloth, with two rows of large navy 
buttons on the breast, trowsers of 
navy-blue or white linen duck cloth, 
according to the season of the year, 
and a navy-blue cloth cap with a 
gold cord, and a silver shield with 
two crossed anchors in front. Differ¬ 
ent sleeve ornaments of gold lace 
are worn by different officers. On 
visits of ceremony, such as visits to 
the President, to the Secretary of 
the Navy, and to foreign officials and 
vessels of war, officers of the navy 
wear blue dress coats with epaulets, 
and cocked hats ; but no officer be¬ 
low the rank of lieutenant wears 
cocked hat or epaulets. When off 
duty on board ship, blue sack coats 
may be worn, but never on shore 
nor in a foreign port. Jackets of 
blue cloth are also sometimes worn 
on board ship. 

Shoulder-Straps of Navy. In the 

navy shoulder-straps are worn only 
by officers above the rank of mas¬ 
ter, masters and ensigns wearing 
the marks of their rank on shoulder- 
loops instead of on straps. Shoul¬ 
der-loops are ornaments of gold em¬ 
broidered cord, made something like 
the top part of an epaulet without 
the fringe, and with a centre of blue 
cloth. All shoulder-straps in the 
navy are made of navy-blue cloth, 
with a gold embroidered edge. The 
marks of rank, put on the cloth in¬ 
side the border, as shown in the pic¬ 
tures, are as follows : admiral, four 
silver stars, with a gold anchor 
under each of the stars at the end ; 
vice-admiral, three silver stars, with 
a gold anchor under the middle one ; 
rear-admiral, two silver stars, with 
a silver anchor between them ; com¬ 
modore, one silver star between two 
silver anchors ; captain, a silver 
spread eagle between two silver an¬ 


chors ; commander, two silver oak 
leaves with a silver anchor between 
them ; lieutenant-commander, two 
gold oak leaves with a silver anchor 
between them ; lieutenant, two gold 
bars at each end, with a silver an¬ 
chor in the middle. The mark of 
rank of a master, worn on the blue 
cloth of the shoulder-loop, is one 
silver bar at each end with a gold 
anchor between them ; and of an 
ensign, a gold anchor lying on its 
side, with one silver bar across the 
shank. Midshipmen, or cadets who 
have just graduated from the Naval 
Academy, wear shoulder-loops 
with a silver anchor embroidered on 
the blue cloth part. 

SHRIMP. The common shrimp 
is one to two inches long, and is 
usually gray, spotted with brown. 
It feeds on worms, slugs, and other 
small animals, and is itself eaten by 
fishes and birds. In England and 
France shrimps are much used for 
food, but in this country they are 
caught mostly for bait, although they 
are often seen in our markets cooked 
for sale. 

The shrimp is a CRUSTACEAN of 
the order decapoda , or ten-footed 
animals, which include also lobsters, 
crabs, and crawfish. 

The word shrimp is provincial Eng¬ 
lish, and means any thing very small. 

SILICON, one of the principal 
non-metallic elements. With the 
exception of OXYGEN, it is the most 
abundant of all the elements. It is 
never found free, that is by itself, 
but always united either with oxy¬ 
gen alone, forming silica (silicon ox¬ 
ide), commonly called rock crystal 
or quartz, which is often found in 
beautiful crystals, as clear as glass 
or ice, or with oxygen and some of 
the metals, forming silicates of those 
metals. A large part of the rocks 
which form the earth’s surface are 
made up of silica, and it is also found 
in many plants, especially in the 
outer skin of the stalks of the 
grasses. The bark of the rattan 
is made hard and flinty by the silica 







SILK 


560 


SILKWORM 


in it. Sandstone, sand, flint, agate, 
opal, amethyst, carnelian, etc., are 
made up mostly of silica. The sili¬ 
cates, made up of silica and some 
of the metals, are very important in 
the arts. Clay is an aluminum 
silicate, and mica is a silicate of alu¬ 
minum, iron, and potassium. Sili¬ 
cates are also made by art. For ex¬ 
ample, the different kinds of GLASS 
are silicates of sodium or of potas¬ 
sium, or of both mixed with silicates 
of other metals, such as calcium, 
lead, and aluminum. 

The word silicon is from the Latin 
si lex, flint. 

SILK, the fibre or thread spun by 
the silkworm. The cocoons, from 
which silk is obtained, are taken 
from the tv/igs to which they are 
fastened before the moth begins to 
eat its way out, and thrown into 
hot water. This kills the moth in¬ 
side and softens the gum with which 
the threads of silk are stuck together. 
The outer floss covering is then 
opened at one end and the cocoon 
with the fine silk around it is slipped 
out. The silk is not spun round and 
round the cocoon like thread wound 
round a spool, but is passed back¬ 
ward and forward, first in one place, 
and then in another, so as to cover 
the whole cocoon. 

When the cocoons are to be un¬ 
wound they are put into a trough of 
hot water, which is divided into four 
parts. Four or five cocoons are 
dropped into each one of these, and 
the threads of each are joined and 
drawn together through an eyelet, 
which scrapes off a good deal of the 
gum and makes one thread of the 
four or five threads. The four 
threads thus made from the cocoons 
in the four parts of the trough are 
afterward brought together so as to 
make one thread, and wound upon 
a reel. When all the silk is wound 
off from one cocoon, another is put 
in its place, and so on until all are 
unwound. The silk thus obtained 
is of a bright yellow color, and is 
called raw silk. J 


About three hundred yards of 
thread are generally got from each 
cocoon, but some have less than 
others. The reeled or raw silk is 
made up in China and Japan into 
bundles called books, which are sent 
to foreign countries to be spun into 
thread and woven into cloth. But 
before it is fit for use it has to be 
carefully washed, and then made 
ready for the weaver by ‘ ‘ throwing. ’ ’ 
The word throwing comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon thrawan, to twirl or 
twist, and the silk is said to be 
thrown when it is doubled and 
twisted into the right kind of thread 
for spinning and weaving. It is 
done in different ways for making 
threads for different kinds of silk 
cloth, such as plain silk, flowered 
silk, velvet, and ribbons, and on 
machines made much like those 
used in cotton spinning. The 
threads are then boiled in soap and 
water to get out the gum, and after¬ 
ward dyed. 

Most of the raw silk used is 
brought from Asia, chiefly from 
China, India, and japan, but a good 
deal is made in Italy, France, and 
Russia. Silk thread and cloth are 
made chiefly in France, Italy, the 
United States, Germany, Great 
Britain, Switzerland, and Belgium. 
Very fine sewing silk is now made 
in this country, and very good dress 
goods, ribbons, braids, and trim¬ 
mings are also made here. 

The word silk is from the Anglo- 
Saxon seolc , which is from the Latin 
sericum, Seric cloth, so called from 
Serica, the ancient name of China, 
from the Chinese word se , which 
means silk. 

SILKWORM. The silkworm, 
from which we get silk, is the cater¬ 
pillar of a kind of moth which feeds 
on the leaves of the mulberry tree. 
This moth came first from the north 
part of China. It has a thick, hairy 
body, about an inch long, stout legs, 
and large white wings, marked with 
dark bands. The female is larger 
than the male, and a little different 






SILKWORM 


561 


SILKWORM 


in form in the body, as may be seen 
in the pictures. She dies soon after 
laying her eggs, and the male does 
not live much longer. 

The eggs, which are about as 
large as mustard seed, are laid 
singly on the leaves of the mulberry 
tree, where they are fastened by a 



Silkworm Moth, Male. 


sticky gum. Each female lays three 
hundred to seven hundred eggs. The 
eggs may be preserved a long time, if 
kept cool and free from damp ; but 
if put in a warm place they will hatch 
out in a few days. When they first 
come from the eggs, the larvae or 
young caterpillars are very small, 


but they soon begin to eat greedily 
of the mulberry leaves and then grow 
very fast. The silkworm lives as a 
caterpillar six or eight weeks, during 
which it changes its skin four times, 
growing in size and in greediness 
each time, and when full grown is 



Silkworm Moth, Female. 


about three inches long and of an 
ashy or cream color. Its body is 
made up of twelve joints, the last 
one of which has on it a kind of horn, 
and it has sixteen legs. The full- 
grown caterpillar is shown in the 
third picture. 



Silkworm Caterpillar, Full grown. 


At the end of about five weeks 
the caterpillar stops eating, and 
crawls about, moving its head around 
and looking for a good place to spin 
its cocoon (see INSECTS), which is 


made of silk from its own body. 
Near the head are two little bags, 
filled with a kind of gum. These 
bags end in two tubes or pipes, 
which join together in the under lip 










SILKWORM 


562 


SILKWORM 


and form a single tube, through 
which the gum is drawn and spun 
into siik. Each thread of silk as it 
comes from the worm is thus made 
of two strands or threads. After 
spinning a few coarse threads to hang 
itself by, the caterpillar folds itself 
up much like a horse shoe, with its 
legs outward, and then spins silk 



Silkworm Cocoon. 


all over its body, moving its head 
round and round. The outside of 
the cocoon is covered with what is 
called floss silk, but within all is made 
of fine silk, stuck together with gum. 
The size and shape of the cocoon 
are shown in the picture. The 
thread of which it is made is all in 
one piece, and about a thousand 
yards long. About the fourth day, 
when it has spun out all its silk, the 
worm inside becomes of a waxy- 
white color. In time the skin wrink¬ 
les and comes off, being pushed off 
down toward the hinder parts, and 
the larva enters on its second stage 
of life and becomes a pupa or chrys¬ 
alis (see Insect), being at first 



Silkworm Pupa. 


white, but afterward dark red. The 
form of the pupa is shown in the 
last picture. 

The silkworm lives in its second 
state fifteen to seventeen days, dur¬ 
ing which a thin skin is formed over 
it in which the pupa changes to a 
winged insect. At the right time it 
breaks this skin, and then wets one 


end of the cocoon with a liquid from 
its head, which soaks through the 
whole thickness of the silk threads 
and separates but does not break 
them. The moth works its way 
through the passage thus made, and 
comes out into the light of day. It 
is then wet, but soon dries itself and 
becomes a perfect moth. The co¬ 
coons from which the insect has 
come out do not give as good silk as 
those which have not been opened, 
so in silk-making countries it is 
usual to kill the chrysalis by steam¬ 
ing the cocoons. 

There are other kinds of silkworms, 
from the cocoons of which silk can 
be got, some of which feed on oak 
leaves, some on the leaves of the 
castor-oil plant, and some on those 
of the ailantus tree ; but none of 
them are so useful as the Chinese 
silkworm. 

The silkworm has been raised in 
China from the most ancient times, 
and for a long period all the silk 
used in the world was brought from 
there. Laws were made forbidding 
the people from sending any silk¬ 
worm eggs out of China, or from 
telling any thing about the manufac¬ 
ture of silk. But at a very early time 
silk was also made in India, and a 
good deal of it was sent from there 
by caravans. The Emperor Justin¬ 
ian I., who reigned at Constantino¬ 
ple from a.d. 527 to 565, tried to 
bring the art of raising silkworms 
into Europe. At last, it is said, two 
monks made their way to China, 
got some of the eggs, and succeeded 
in bringing them out of the country 
inside their canes. They took them 
to Constantinople, where they were 
hatched and fed on mulberry leaves, 
and from them all parts of the East¬ 
ern Empire were in time supplied 
with worms. In southern Greece 
great numbers of silkworms were 
raised, and it was probably from 
this that the name of the Pelopon¬ 
nesus was changed to Morea, from 
morus, the Latin name of the mul¬ 
berry tree. 





SILVER 


563 


SIPHON 


For a long time Europe got all 
its silk from Greece and Constanti¬ 
nople, but in the eighth century the 
Arabs carried the silkworm into 
Spain. After the twelfth century it 
became known in many other parts 
of Europe, and Italy soon became 
the principal place where silk was 
made. In the sixteenth century it 
became an important business in 
France. The chief countries where 
raw silk is now made are China, 
which makes the most, and after it, 
Italy, India, France, Japan, Russia, 
Turkey, and Persia. Efforts have 
been made to raise silkworms in this 
country, but they have not been very 
successful. 

The silkworm belongs to the order 
lepidoptera , or scale-winged IN¬ 
SECTS, and to the same family with 
the butterfly. 

The word silkworm is from the 
Anglo-Saxon^/^, SILK, and wyrin , 
worm. 

SILVER, a METAL, and one of the 
principal elements. It is one of 
the most valued of the metals. It 
is found in many places, but never 
entirely pure, being usually mixed 
with mercury, gold, or copper, and 
sometimes with other metals. 
When pure, silver is white, very 
bright, takes a beautiful polish, is 
harder than gold and softer than 
copper, and is easily hammered out 
into thin sheets and drawn out into 
wire. It does not unite with oxy¬ 
gen easily, and therefore never 
tarnishes in the air, whether wet or 
dry, but when brought near to SUL¬ 
PHUR turns black, forming sulphide 
of silver. Eggs turn silver black be¬ 
cause they have sulphur in them. 

Most of the silver of commerce is 
got from ores of silver, chiefly sul¬ 
phides (silver and sulphur) and chlo¬ 
rides (silver and chlorine). The 
ores are roasted in fires, then crushed 
to powder by machinery, and mixed 
with MERCURY, which unites with the 
silver and forms a kind of pasty mass 
called an amalgam. This is then 
heated in close iron vessels, and the 


mercury passes off as a vapor, leav¬ 
ing the silver by itself. The mercury 
vapor goes into another vessel called 
a receiver, where it is cooled by 
water and turns back to liquid mer¬ 
cury again. Much silver is also got 
from galena (lead sulphide), which 
usually has silver in it. The lead is 
melted in large iron pots and let cool 
slowly, being stirred all the while. 
The lead forms in hard crystals 
which settle to the bottom of the 
liquid metal, whence they may be 
dipped out in colanders or strainers, 
which let the silver run through 
them. By remelting the metal and 
doing the same thing several times, 
most of the lead can be got out, leav¬ 
ing the silver. 

Silver, next to gold, is the most 
valued of the metals for use in the 
arts. As the pure metal is too soft 
to wear well, it is usually hardened 
by mixing a little copper with it. 
The silver coins of the United States 
and of France are made of one part 
copper and nine parts silver ; those 
of Great Britain have a little less cop¬ 
per, and those of Germany a little 
more copper. The compounds of sil¬ 
ver are very valuable. Among them 
are the nitrate of silver (silver ni¬ 
trate), made up of silver and NITRIC 
ACID, much used in taking PHOTO¬ 
GRAPHS, making indelible INK and 
hair dyes, and in medicine as lunar 
caustic ; and silver chloride, made 
up of silver and chlorine, which is 
also of great importance in photog¬ 
raphy. 

The chief silver-producing coun¬ 
tries of the world are the United 
States and Mexico. The most im¬ 
portant silver mines are in Nevada 
and Colorado. Much is also got in 
Central and South America, Ger¬ 
many, Austria, Spain, Italy, and 
other countries. 

The word silver is from the Anglo- 
Saxon silfor , silver. 

SIPHON, a bent tube used for 
drawing off a liquid from one vessel 
to another. In the picture the tube 
A B C D is a siphon. The shorter 




SKATE 


564 


SKIN 


leg, A B, is put into the liquid E, 
which is to be drawn off into G. If 
the air be taken out of the tube the 
pressure of the AIR on the surface of 
the liquid in E will force the liquid 
up the tube A B, and it will then fill 



the whole tube and continue to run 
until all the liquid in E has run into 
the vessel G. 

The word siphon is from the Latin 
sipho , siphon. 

SKATE. The first skates were 
made of bone, and they were tied to 
the feet with strings. Iron or steel 
skates are supposed to have been 
first made by the Dutch, who have 
used them for a long time for travel¬ 
ling on the many canals with which 
their country is crossed. Men go to 
their labor on skates, and market 
women skate to town early in the 
morning with heavy baskets on 
their heads. In Sweden and Nor¬ 
way, where there are many lakes, 
men, women, and children may be 
seen skating on every pleasant win¬ 
ter day ; and in England and Scot¬ 
land too there are many fine skaters. 

Skates were formerly made with 
grooved bottoms, so that the two 
sharp edges would cut into the ice 
and thus keep the skater from slip¬ 
ping sideways, but they are now gen¬ 
erally made flat on the bottom. The 
irons are usually curved a little on 
the bottom, and rounded up at both 
heel and toe. There are many differ¬ 
ent kinds of fastenings for skates : 
some have straps and buckles, some 


are made to fit the foot like a shoe, 
and some are fastened to the sole of 
the boot with metal clamps. The 
irons of the best skates are some¬ 
times plated with nickel to keep them 
from rusting. Common skating, 
that is, skating straight ahead, is 
easy to learn, but fine skating is very 
hard and needs much practice. The 
best skaters can go backward as 
easily as forward, and can cut all 
kinds of graceful curves and figures 
on the ice. 

Parlor Skates are made for use on 
wooden floors or smooth pavements. 
In place of runners, like common 
skates, they have little rollers of 
wood, India rubber, or metal, which 
run one behind the other, like the 
wheels of a velocipede. Some good 
skaters can skate as well with such 
skates on a floor as they can with 
common ones on ice, and exhibitions 
are sometimes given by them in 
theatres and large halls. 

The word skate is from the Dutch 
sc/iaats , skate. 

SKIN. The skin is the covering 
of the body, and it hides and keeps 
from injury the muscles, bones, 
nerves, arteries, and veins. The 
skin of most animals is covered with 
hair and fur, feathers, scales, bony 
plates, or shells, but that of man is 
nearly bare, and he has, therefore, 
to wear clothes to suit the weather. 
The skin is nicely fitted to all parts 
of the body, being loose and wrinkled 
in some places where it would not do 
to have it tight, and thick in those 
parts which are much used, such as 
the palms of the hands and the soles 
of the feet. 

To the naked eye our skin appears 
quite smooth, but when looked at 
through a microscope, it is seen to 
be covered with little scales. The 
skin is made up of two different 
layers. The upper layer, called the 
epidermis, is a mass of little bodies 
or cells packed closely together. On 
the top these are pressed so flat that 
they form scales, but lower down 
they are round or oval. On parts 



























SKIN 


565 


SKIN 


of the body where it is thick the 
epidermis may be cut or shaved off 
without harm, for there are no blood¬ 
vessels in it. This part of the skin 
is always growing, and the top scales 
are all the time being rubbed off. 
Whenever the hands are washed 
some of it is rubbed off, and it would 
soon be all worn away if new cells 
were not always growing at the 
lower part and moving up to the top 
and drying into scales. Thus the 
epidermis is always being renewed. 
The nails of the fingers and toes of 
men, the claws of birds and of flesh¬ 
eating animals, the hoofs and horns 
of cud-chewing animals, the shell of 
turtles and tortoises, whalebone, and 
the quills of birds are all made up of 
the same things as the epidermis, 
and are really a part of it. They 
have cells like those of the epidermis, 
and like it are all the time growing 
and wearing away. The nails of 
man grow so fast that they have to 
be cut often to keep them neat. 
They should always be cut at the 
ends and never at the sides, and 
should be kept clean with a nail 
brush and never scraped with a 
knife. Biting of the nails is a bad 
habit which not only spoils their 
beauty, but often makes sore fingers 
which are hard to cure. 

Under the epidermis is a lower 
layer, called the dermis or true skin, 
which grows fast to it but may be 
separated from it, as may be seen 
when the upper skin is raised by a 
blister. The dermis is not smooth 
on top, but is raised up in little hills, 
called papillae, over which the epi¬ 
dermis fits so as to fill up all the 
hollows between. The papillae are 
filled with blood-vessels, and of 
course when cut into will bleed. On 
account of these blood-vessels the 
true skin is always red, and it is this 
which, shining through the whitish 
epidermis, makes it pink or flesh- 
colored. Wherever the epidermis is 
thinnest, there the skin is reddest, 
as in the lips, the inside of the 
mouth, etc. The skin on the inside 


of the mouth is not generally called 
skin, but mucous membrane, but it 
is made up in much the same way as 
the skin on the outer parts of the 
body. The epidermis is generally 
dry, but the dermis is always damp, 
because some of the waste parts of 
the blood pass through the skin of 
the blood-vessels and thus wet every 
thing round them. 

Though the epidermis is generally 
dry, it is sometimes quite damp, as 
when we sweat or perspire. This is 
because the outer skin is full of little 
tubes, which run down through both 
layers of skin and twist up in a knot 
at the end among the capillaries or 
blood-vessels. The waste parts of 
the blood are always oozing through 
the skins of the capillaries into 
these tubes, which are rightly called 
glands, and much of it turns into 
vapor and passes off into the air ; 
but often, when the capillaries get 
very full of blood, these tubes or 
glands fill up with a watery fluid and 
overflow at their mouths, or pores as 
they are commonly called, over the 
outside skin. We call this fluid 
sweat or perspiration. When we 
take violent exercise the blood rushes 
to the outer parts of the body, and 
a great deal of this fluid is thrown 
off. As this is waste matter from 
the blood, our health requires that 
the pores should always be kept 
open. As told above, the scales of 
the skin are all the time coming off, 
so that we are always shedding our 
outer skin. If this be left on the 
body, it will mix with the perspira¬ 
tion and in time form a kind of 
paste which will harden and fill up 
the pores, and the skin will then be¬ 
come inflamed and diseased. Stop¬ 
ping up the pores of the skin has 
even led to death. Many years ago 
the body of a little boy, who was to 
take a part in some public procession 
in Italy, was covered with gold leaf. 
To make the gold leaf stick, his skin 
was covered with a kind of varnish, 
this filled up all the pores, so that 
the perspiration was wholly stopped, 







SKUNK 


566 


SLATE 


and the little fellow died a few hours 
afterward. 

The best way to keep the skin 
healthy is to wash it often with 
warm water and soap. The whole 
body should be washed once every 
day, and such parts as the hands 
and face, which are open to the dirt, 
several times a day. In this way the 
dry scales of the skin will be got rid 
of as soon as they become loosened, 
and the pores will be kept open. 
Generally, the water used should be 
of the same heat as the air of the 
room, but in winter it may be a little 
warmer (see Bath). 

The word skin is from the Anglo- 
Saxon scinn, skin. 

SKUNK. The skunk is found only 
in America. It is generally about 
eighteen inches long, with very short 
legs, and a long tail. Its fur is 
usually black, with a white tuft on 
the end of the tail. It lives in bur¬ 
rows in the ground, and feeds on 
birds, eggs, small mammals, rep¬ 
tiles, insects, and fruits. The skunk 
is a timid animal and slow in its 
motions, but has a strong defence 
against its enemies in a very offen¬ 
sive fluid, carried in little bags un¬ 
der its tail, which it has the power 
of squirting ten or fifteen feet, in 
two fine streams. The odor is so 
strong that it is almost impossible to 
get it out of clothes touched by it. 
Notwithstanding this the skunk is a 
very clean animal, and is careful not 
to get the fluid on its own fur. The 
flesh of the skunk is white and juicy ; 
it is much liked by the Indians and 
is eaten by many white people also. 
The skins are valuable for the fur, 
and the grease of the animal is good 
for dressing leather. 

The skunk is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the weasel family. 

The word skunk is shortened from 
the Indian seganku , skunk. 

SLATE, a hard, tough rock, which 
easily splits up into thin plates. It 
is usually fine - grained, and of a 
grayish or bluish black or greenish 


blue color, but sometimes green and 
reddish brown. The largest slate 
quarries in the world are in Wales, 
more than 3000 men being employed 
in them. There are also fine quar¬ 
ries in Scotland and France, and, in 
the United States, in Maine, Ver¬ 
mont, New York, Pennsylvania, 
Maryland, Virginia, and other States. 
Slate is usually quarried either by 
blasting it out in large slabs, or by 
splitting it off with wedges. The 
slabs are split up into sheets by driv¬ 
ing wide thin chisels between the 
layers with wooden mallets, and the 
sheets are then cut up into the sizes 
wanted. In this country much of 
the cutting and trimming of slate is 
done by machines. Large slabs for 
mantels, table-tops, and other orna¬ 
mental furniture, are sawn out with 
circular saws, and then planed 
smooth by planing machines like 
those for planing metals. The sur¬ 
faces of such slates are sometimes 
enamelled to look like marble or 
other fine stones, and then baked in 
ovens, and polished. Large slate 
slabs are used also for making the 
beds of billiard tables, counters for 
stores, and sinks. Small sheets of 
slate are used for roofing buildings 
and for writing slates. Roofing 
slates are split out rough and 
squared, and have two small holes 
made in one end for the nails by 
which they are fastened to the roof 
boards. Writing or school slates 
and slate blackboards are split and 
cut into the right shapes, and then 
polished smooth with pumice stone. 
Slate pencils are made of a kind of 
soft slate stone, of which the best is 
found in Vermont. The stone is 
sawn into small blocks and split into 
sheets about a quarter inch thick, 
then planed smooth in one machine 
and cut into pencils in another. 
The dust and small pieces are after¬ 
ward ground up into flour and also 
made into pencils, so that none of 
the slate is wasted-. 

The word slate is from the old Eng¬ 
lish sclate, French esclat , a splinter. 






SLEIGH 


567 


SMELT 


SLEIGH, SLEDGE, SLED. What 
we call a sleigh in the United States 
is called a sledge in England. In 
this country we go a sleigh riding, 
but in England they go a sledge 
driving. The name sled is com¬ 
monly given to a kind of sledge 
used for drawing heavy loads on 
snow or ice, and also to small hand j 
sleighs used by children for coasting j 
or sliding down hill. Light sleighs 
made to be drawn by one horse are 
usually called cutters. 

In Russia, in the northern parts 
of the United States, and in other 
countries where there is much snow 
in winter, sleighs are made very 
handsome, almost as much care 
being taken in their construction as 
in that of carriages. The princi¬ 
pal kind of sleigh in Russia is called 
a tro'ika, which is something like 
our large sleighs, with seats for four 
persons inside, facing each other, 
and a seat in front for the driver. 
But the troika is drawn by three 
horses, the one in the middle being 
harnessed in the shafts, and having 
a wooden arch over his back with 
sleigh-bells on it; the other two have 
each a trace on the outside, and a 
strap in front by which they are 
fastened to the collar of the middle 
horse. They are driven with four 
reins, two for the shaft-horse, and 
one each for the outsiders. The 
shaft-horse trots, but the outer ones 
usually gallop. In St. Petersburg 
coaches and coupes are also made 
into sleighs by taking off the wheels 
and setting the bodies on runners, 
just as is sometimes done in this 
country. 

In Russia sleighs are generally 
all of the same form, the nobleman’s 
differing from the peasant’s only in 
the greater richness of its wood and 
metal work, and of its cushions and 
furs ; but in Holland they are made 
of a great many different shapes. 
Sleighs or sledges made in the form 
of swans, dragons, and sea-shells, 
with their panels beautifully painted 
and gilded, and drawn by horses 


decked with plumes and bells, or 
pushed from behind by skaters, may 
be seen in winter gliding over the 
frozen canals. In Lapland and the 
northern parts of Sweden and Nor¬ 
way, where snow lies on the ground 
a great part of the year, sleighs 
called pulkas, which are made some¬ 
thing like boats, are used, drawn by 
reindeer. Wrapped in furs, and 
packed closely in his pulka, the Lap¬ 
lander is drawn with great swiftness 
over the frozen snow by a single 
reindeer, which he drives with one 
rein. 

In the arctic regions dogs are 
much used for drawing sledges. 
The Esquimaux have a breed of dogs 
which they train for this purpose, 
often harnessing six or eight of them 
to one sledge. They draw their 
masters at great speed over the 
snow and ice, often carrying large 
loads besides. These dogs are also 
much used by arctic explorers for 
travelling when their ships are 
frozen up in the ice. 

In Canada the Indians make a 
kind of sled which they call a “ to¬ 
boggan,” and with which they often 
travel hundreds of miles over the 
snow to the trading posts, dragging 
on them loads of furs for sale. A 
toboggan is made out of a thin 
board of some hard wood, such as 
bass, oak, or ash, curved up in front 
like the dash-board of a sleigh, and 
strengthened with a kind of frame 
tied together with leather strings. 
Toboggans are also much used in 
Canada for coasting, and a great 
many are made eveiy year for gen¬ 
tlemen and ladies in Montreal, Que¬ 
bec, and Ottawa, where they are 
very fashionable. 

The word sleigh is probably a form 
of sledge or sled, which is from the 
Anglo-Saxon slidan , to slide. 

SMELT, a small fish of the sal¬ 
mon family, found in Europe and 
North America. The common 
American smelt, caught along the 
Atlantic coast from New York north¬ 
ward, is five to ten inches long, cop- 





SNAIL 


568 


SNAKES 


pery green on the back and silvery- 
white beneath. It goes up rivers in 
spring and returns to the sea in a 
autumn. Great numbers are caught 
at these times both in nets and by 
hook, and sent to market, where 
they meet with a ready sale, as they 
are very sweet and delicate. 

The word smelt is Anglo-Saxon, 
and the fish is said be so called from 
its smell, which is something like 
that of the cucumber; but some 
think it is from the Anglo-Saxon 
smell , small. 

SNAIL. There are many hundred 
kinds of snails, some of which are 
found in all parts of the world. The 
common garden snail, the form of 
which is well shown in the picture, 
has a soft jelly-like body, and a hard 


and other soft things. Snails feed 
mostly in the night time, and will 
often spoil a garden in a single night. 
They live usually in damp places, 
such as the shady walks of parks 
and gardens. On the coming of 
cold weather they crawl under a 
stone or log, draw their body into its 
shell and spend the winter in a numb 
state. 

The ancients used to eat snails and 
thought them to be great delicacies. 
The Romans served up several 
kinds, brought from different coun¬ 
tries, at their feasts, and so great 
was the demand for them that parks 
were made where snails were raised 
and fattened, just as is now done 
with oysters. After the fall of the 
Roman Empire snails were not 
eaten much for several hun¬ 
dred years, but they are now 
eaten in Austria, Italy, and 
France, both cooked whole 
and made into soup, especially 
during Lent. 

The snail is a MOLLUSK 
of the family gasteropoda , or 
belly-footed animals. 

The word snail is from the 
Anglo-Saxon sncegel, which is 
from snican , to creep. 

SNAKES. These reptiles, 
which are also called serpents, 
have long, narrow bodies, without 
any neck, and without limbs. Like 
other vertebrate animals, they have 
a backbone, a skull, and ribs, but no 
other bones. The backbone is made 
up often of several hundred joints, 
almost all of which have two ribs 
joined to them, one on each side, as 
shown in the picture. The back¬ 
bone is so jointed that their bodies 
are very limber and can be turned 
in any way or even twisted up into 
coils and knots. They have an 
under skin covered with scales, and 
over this a thin skin which is shed 
every year and sometimes oftener. 
When the time comes for it to be 
cast off, it begins to part at the head 
and then peels off toward the tail, 
being turned inside out just as the 



Garden Snail. 


shell. The lower part of its body, 
which is called the foot, is long and 
flat. By drawing this up and push¬ 
ing it out again the animal can 
creep, but not very fast. When at 
rest the whole body can be drawn 
into the shell. 

The snail has a head with two pairs 
of feelers on it, shown on the right 
side of the picture. The upper pair, 
which are larger and longer than the 
lower pair, can be entirely drawn 
into a kind of sheath. The round 
knobs on the ends of these are the 
eyes of the snail. At the end of the 
head is the mouth, with a horny 
toothed jaw on the upper lip, against 
which the animal presses its food 
with its tongue. It can thus chew 
tender leaves, fruit, mushrooms, 





SNAKES 


569 


SNAKES 


finger of a glove is sometimes turned 
in pulling it off. Snakes living in 
cold climates usually lie in winter in 
clefts of rocks or in holes under 
trees in a numb state, and shed their 
skins when they wake up in the 
spring. Several hundred of differ¬ 
ent kinds have been dug out of a sin¬ 
gle hole, where they had got to¬ 
gether to keep warm. 

Snakes can creep, spring, climb, 
swim, squeeze things tight in their 
folds, hang themselves by the tail, 
and burrow in the ground, and some 
can stand up nearly straight. They 
creep by means of their ribs, each 
one of which ends in a scale on the 
outside of the skin. When these 
scales are pushed backward against 
the earth, the snake’s body is moved 


along just as if they were so many 
little feet to walk upon. A snake’s 
track on the ground is crooked, and 
the windings are always sideways 
and not up and down, as is some¬ 
times seen in pictures. When a 
snake springs, it coils its body up 
like a coil of rope and then by sud¬ 
denly straightening it out throws it¬ 
self forward. It can thus leap more 
than its own length. Snakes can 
climb trees and can go up very steep 
places which are rough enough for 
their scales to catch hold of, but they 
cannot creep at all on smooth sur¬ 
faces like glass. Some snakes live in 
damp marshy places, some in sandy 
deserts, some among rocks, some 
in thick woods, and some in fresh 


and some in salt water. Some spend 
most of their time in trees, and some 
burrow in the ground. Most snakes 
can see well, though their eyes are 
small and covered with a horny scale, 
but their senses of hearing,. smell, 
touch, and taste are dull. Their teeth 
are sharp, but they use them only 
for piercing and holding on to their 
prey and never for cutting up or 
chewing their food. They feed on 
living prey, which they swallow 
whole. They eat and drink but 
seldom, and can go a long time 
without eating, waiting for their food 
to digest. Some snakes catch their 
prey by running, some spring upon 
it from amongst bushes or from the 
limbs of trees, some poison their 
victims, and some charm birds and 
small animals so that 
they come within reach 
of their jaws. Snakes 
feel mostly with the 
tongue, which is long, 
tough, and forked at 
the end, but they do 
not bite or sting with it 
as many think. 

Most snakes are 
hatched from laid eggs, 
but in a few kinds the 
young are born alive. 
The eggs, which have 
soft, thin shells, are 
usually in a kind of chain, stuck to¬ 
gether with a gummy substance. 
The mother does not make any 
nest, but hides the eggs away in 
some safe place, and leaves them to 
be hatched by the sun and by rot¬ 
ting vegetable matter, which gives 
off much heat by fermenting (see 
Beer) ; but some kinds of snakes 
coil around their eggs and hatch 
them. Young snakes are of the same 
shape when born as they are when 
they grow up, and most of them are 
able to take care of themselves as 
soon as they leave the shell ; but 
there are a few kinds which look 
after their young ones and when 
danger is coming open their mouths 
and let them run down their throats, 



Skeleton of Snake. 






SNAKES 


570 


SNAKES 


letting them run out again as soon 
as a safe place is reached. 

There are about a thousand kinds 
of known snakes in the world, most 
of which live in hot countries. They 
are divided into two classes, those 
whose bite is poisonous and those 



Head of Rattlesnake, cut open to show Poison Bag. 

which are not poisonous. Among 
the poison snakes are the rattle¬ 
snake and copperhead of the 
United States, the cobra de capello 
(Portuguese, hooded snake) of south¬ 
ern Asia and the viper of middle and 
southern Europe. The rattlesnake 
is so called because it has some 
loose bony rings at the end of its 
tail which rattle when the tail is 
shaken. It is not known exactly 
what the rattles are for : some think 
they are to frighten other animals, 
and some that they are to call other 
rattlesnakes. Like most other poi¬ 
sonous snakes it has a flat three-cor¬ 
nered head, and in its mouth are 
two sharp fangs or pointed teeth 
with which it bites. These fangs, 
which are shown in the picture 
raised up and ready to bite, usually 
lie down flat when the mouth is 
shut. These are the only large teeth 
the snake has. Each has a hollow 
running through it, as shown in the 
third picture, and each has a little 
canal running from its base to the 
poison bag, marked a in the second 
picture. The parts marked e, /, g, 


h , and u are muscles by which the 
jaws are opened and shut. When 
the rattlesnake bites, the muscles 
which close the jaws press at the 
same time on the poison bag and 
squeeze some of the poison through 
the canal into the fangs, from which 
it goes into the wound. 
The poison, which is a taste¬ 
less, colorless liquid, goes 
into the blood of the animal 
bitten and usually kills it. 
Small animals die in a few 
minutes, and horses, cattle, 
and men generally in a few 
hours, although some have 
lived several days and some 
have got well after a rattle¬ 
snake bite. There are sev¬ 
eral kinds of rattlesnakes in 
the United States, most of 
which live in the hot parts. 
The hog can kill rattle¬ 
snakes well, as it hunts them 
fearless of the fangs, which 
are harmless to it. Settlers in a new 
country where rattlesnakes abound 
often turn a drove of hogs loose to 
clear the way for their home. 

The copperhead is 
the most poisonous 
American snake, 
next to the rattle¬ 
snake. It is named 
from its color, which 
is reddish-brown or 
coppery. In some 
places it is called 
also “chunkhead,” 
from the shape of its 
head, and “ deaf ad¬ 
der,” because it 
sometimes seems to 
be deaf. It lives in 
damp, dark places, 
and feeds on frogs, 
mice, birds, and liz¬ 
ards. From its thick 
body and short tail 
it is very slow and 
clumsy, but it is more to be feared 
than the rattlesnake, because it lies 
hidden in the grass, and has no rattle 
to tell people where it is. Almost all 



Fang of 
Rattlesnake. 







SNAKES 


57 i 


SNIPE 


the other kinds of snakes in America 
are harmless ; though they some¬ 
times bite, their teeth are solid and 
they have no poison bags. 

The poison fangs and the poison 
of all the deadly snakes are much 
the same. Few people are killed 
in this country by snake bites, but 
in Asia and Africa, where poisonous 
snakes are numerous, a great many 
die from this cause every year. In 
India alone more than ten thousand 
have been killed in one year. Al¬ 
most all these were bitten by the 
cobra de capello, yet the people of 
India worship this dreadful serpent. 
If one is found in a house it is 
petted, fed, and tenderly cared for. 
Indian jugglers or snake charmers 
carry cobras around with them, 
wind them round their necks, and 
make them do various tricks. They 
can make them come out of their 
holes at any time by playing on the 
flute. 

The most remarkable of all the 
snakes which are not poisonous are 
those called boas, which include the 
pythons of the East Indies, the 
boas and anacondas of the warm 
parts of America, and others. All 
the boas are called constrictors 
(from Latin constringere, to draw 
together by binding), because they 
kill their prey by winding themselves 
round it and squeezing it. They 
have no poison fangs, but have 
long, sharp teeth with which they 
seize and hold on to an animal while 
they wind their folds around it. 
They draw the folds tighter and 
tighter until all the bones are 
crushed, then wet the body with 
their spittle, which is thick and oily, 
and swallow it whole. Their jaws 
and throat are so made that they 
will stretch easily, and a boa can 
thus swallow an animal much larger 
than its own body. After such a 
meal it lies in a numb state until its 
food is digested, which sometimes 
takes several weeks. 

The python of the East Indies is 
sometimes five times as long as a 


man, and is able to crush and swal¬ 
low whole a buffalo or a tiger. 
These snakes pile up their eggs and 
coil around them, laying their head 
on the top, and thus hatch them by 
the warmth of the body. The rock 
snake of South Africa is usually a 
little shorter than the python, but it 
is as large round as the body of a 
stout man. There are several kinds 
of boas in America, the largest being 
the anaconda, which is sometimes 
forty feet long. It lives mostly in 
watery places, especially where riv¬ 
ers and narrow streams are shaded 
by thick woods, and often lies in 
wait for animals which come to 
drink. It can swim, can stay a 
long time under water, and may 
often be seen floating lazily on the 
surface of a stream. It also climbs 
trees and lies coiled among 
branches. The Indians in South 
America kill anacondas with guns 
and bows and arrows, eat their flesh, 
and make shoes and bags of their 
skin, and oil of their fat. 

Snakes or serpents form an order 
of the class of REPTILES. 

The word snake is from the Anglo- 
Saxon snaca, which is from snican , 
to creep. Serpent is from the Latin 
serpens , serpent, which is from ser - 
pere y to creep. 

SNIPE, the common name of a 
family of wading birds, with short 
legs, and a long, straight, slender 
bill. The snipe is found in both 
Europe and America. The gray 
snipe of North America lives in 
flocks near the sea, where it feeds 
on worms, insects, and small shell 
fish ; but the common or Wilson’s 
snipe is seldom seen on the sea 
shore, and lives mostly on leeches 
and other worms. It is about ten 
inches long, and is brownish-black 
above spotted with yellowish-white, 
and whitish below. Its eggs are 
olive yellow, specked with brown. 
This snipe goes to Canada to breed 
in the summer, and returns south in 
the autumn. Its flesh is delicate 
and highly prized for food. 




SNOW 


572 


SNOW 


The snipe belongs to the order 
grallatores, or wading birds. 

The word snipe is in German 
schnepfe , which is from schneppe , 
bill, and the bird gets its name from 
its long bill. 

SNOW. In the article Rain it is 
told that the watery vapor in the air 
is changed, according to circum¬ 
stances, into dew, rain, hail, or 
snow. When it is condensed, or 
changed into water at a heat below 
the freezing point, it forms crystals 
and becomes snow. Thus snow is 
nothing but water frozen or made 
solid up in the air before it falls. 
When looked at with the naked eye 
snow flakes appear to be all alike, 
but they are not. When viewed 
through a MICROSCOPE snow is seen 
to be made up of many beautiful 
little crystals as regularly formed as 


those of quartz. These are of a 
great many different shapes, but 
they usually have the form of a six- 
pointed star, like those shown in the 
picture. Some snow crystals are as 
much as an inch wide, but they are 
usually much smaller. The colder 
the weather is the smaller they are. 
Much more snow falls in the night 
than in the day time. Snow flakes 
bring with them in falling all the fine 
dust in the air, so that the atmos¬ 
phere is always very pure after a 
snow storm. Sometimes snow is 
tinged red, green, yellow, or black, 
by very small plants which become 
mixed with it in the air. In the 
polar regions snow falls every month 
and lies on the ground all the year 
round, and even in the hottest coun¬ 
tries it is always to be found on the 
tops of high mountains, but it usu- 



Forms of Snow Crystals. 


ally melts before it reaches the lower 
lands and comes down as rain. The 
flooding of rivers from the thawing 
of snow on mountains carries much 
rich soil to the plains and makes 
fertile lands out of barren wastes. 
The snow which lies on the ground 
in winter keeps it warm and saves 
plants from being injured in very 
cold seasons. 

Sometimes such great quantities 
of snow fall that immense damage is 
done. One of the worst snow 
storms known in America was in 
1717 (February 19 to 24), when the 
snow lay five to six feet deep all 
over New England. Terrible snow 
storms sometimes occur in the High¬ 
lands of Scotland. One which lasted 
for thirteen days in the year 1620 is 
still told about by the Scotch shep¬ 
herds, who call it the “ thirteen 


drifty days. ’ ’ The cold was greater 
than was ever before remembered, 
and when the storm ceased, on the 
fourteenth day, not a living sheep 
was to be seen on many of the higher 
farms. Whole flocks were huddled 
together in their folds frozen stiff, 
and though some on the lower farms 
lived through the storm, the greater 
part of them died afterward from the 
exposure. On the 24th of January, 
1795, occurred another great snow 
storm in which seventeen shepherds 
and thousands of sheep and other 
animals lost their lives. Whole 
flocks were buried up in the snow 
and no one knew where they were 
until the snow melted, when they 
were all found dead. Many too 
were swept off into the rivers and 
never heard of. 

In the famous mountain pass of 









SOAP 


573 


SOAPSTONE 


the Great Saint Bernard, in the 
Pennine Alps, the snow lies in win¬ 
ter from ten to forty feet deep, and 
travellers are often lost in it. Many 
hundreds have been rescued from 
death by the efforts of the monks, 
who live in the monastery near the 
highest part of the pass, and who 
with their noble Saint Bernard DOGS 
are always on the lookout for belated 
travellers. When the snow falls 
thick and fast and the wind blows 
it in blinding gusts, these dogs are 
often sent out alone to search for 
travellers who may have wandered 
from the path, and their sharp 
scent enables them to find even 
those buried under the snow. When 
they discover a person numbed with 
the cold or hidden under an ava¬ 
lanche, they run and give the alarm 
and bring the monks to the place. 
One famous dog, named Barry, 
saved the lives of forty persons lost 
in the snow. 

We who see snow every winter 
can scarcely understand how strange 
it looks to those who have never 
seen it before. A little girl from 
one of the West India Islands cried 
out, when she saw it falling for the 
first time, that the angels were emp¬ 
tying all their feather beds on the 
earth. When Bruce, the celebrated 
African traveller, was in Abyssinia, 
an old man drew him aside one day 
and told him that when he was a 
young man he saw something white 
fall out of the sky, which covered all 
the earth, and which went away as 
silently as it came. He did not know 
that Bruce came from a country 
where snow was common, and 
thought he was telling him a wonder¬ 
ful thing. 

The Saxons called snow snaw y 
and out of this our word has grown. 

SOAP, a substance formed by the 
union of an alkali with oils and 
fats. The alkalies used are SODA 
and POTASH, hard soaps being made 
with soda and soft soaps with 
potash. The principal fats and oils 
used are tallow, lard, fish oils, and 


palm, olive, cocoanut, rape, linseed, 
hempseed, and other vegetable oils. 

Soap is made by boiling fat or oils 
in great kettles with a ley made by 
mixing water with either caustic 
soda or caustic potash. Common 
soft soap, much used by farmers 
and in cloth factories, is made by 
boiling tallow or other grease with 
potash ley made from wood ashes. 
Hard yellow bar soap is made of tal¬ 
low and various oils boiled with soda 
ley. A little rosin is added after 
the boiling is done. The soap, 
which is then soft, is poured into 
wooden or iron frames to cool and 
harden, and is afterward cut up into 
bars. Castile soap and the fine 
soaps made for toilet use are mostly 
made with olive oils and soda. 
They are usually scented with es¬ 
sential oils, and made into cakes 
which are stamped in a press. 
Many kinds of toilet soap are col¬ 
ored, but the purest and best soaps 
are white. Most of the fine soaps 
used in the United States are 
brought from England and France, 
but excellent soaps are now made in 
this country. 

There are several trees and plants 
in the world whose berries, juice, or 
bark are as good to wash with as 
real soap. In the West India 
Islands and in South America grows 
a kind of tree whose fruit makes an 
excellent lather and is used to wash 
clothes. The bark of a tree that 
grows in Peru, and of another one 
that grows in the Malay Islands, 
makes a fine soap ; and in California 
there is a plant whose bulbs are used 
in the wash tub just as we use soap. 
When these bulbs are rubbed on 
clothes a thick lather is made, which 
smells like that of new soap. The 
juice of the soapwort and of some 
other plants is also used to clean 
with. 

The word soap is from the Anglo- 
Saxon sdfie, from the Greek, sapon, 
soap. 

SOAPSTONE, or TALC, a soft 

mineral, commonly pearly-gray, but 




SODA 


574 


SODA WATER 


sometimes white, whitish-green, and 
grayish-green. There are large 
quarries in Massachusetts, Vermont, 
New Hampshire, Maryland, Vir¬ 
ginia, and other States. Stoves, 
ovens, and hearths are made of it ; 
and it is used for slate pencils and 
crayons, by glaziers for marking 
glass to be cut, and by chemists for 
the stoppers of vessels for holding 
acids. French chalk, used by tailors 
to mark on cloth with, is a kind of 
soapstone ; and the powder used by 
shoemakers to dust the inside of 
boots with to make them go on easily 
is made of ground soapstone. 

The word soapstone is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon sdpe, soap, and 
stan , stone, and the mineral is so 
called from its soapy feel. 

SODA, sodium oxide, one of the 
principal alkalies. If the metal 
sodium be kept in the air it will 
quickly unite with the OXYGEN and 
form sodium oxide. But that which 
is commonly called soda is properly 
sodium carbonate, which is made up 
of sodium, oxygen, and CARBON. It 
was formerly made from the ashes 
of sea weeds and sea-shore plants. 
There was once a large trade in 
crude soda called barilla, made from 
the ashes of a plant which grows on 
the sea-coasts of Spain and France, 
and in a poorer kind called kelp, 
made from the ashes of seaweed on 
the coasts of England, Scotland, and 
the Shetland Islands ; but carbonate 
of soda is now made almost entirely 
from common SALT (sodium chlo¬ 
ride). Soda is largely used in mak¬ 
ing GLASS and SOAP, and in wash¬ 
ing, both in cloth factories and in 
dwellings. Housekeepers usually 
call it washing soda. The soda r 
used by soap-makers is caustic soda 
(sodium hydrate), made by mixing 
sodium carbonate with boiling water 
and then pouring into it slaked lime 
and water. The CALCIUM of the 
lime seizes on the carbonic acid in 
the sodium carbonate and forms cal¬ 
cium carbonate, which sinks to the 
bottom, leaving the caustic soda 


mixed with the water. This is then 
boiled down until the water passes 
off as steam, leaving the white soda 
by itself. The soda sold by grocers 
and used by cooks in making bread, 
cake, puddings, etc., is commonly 
called cooking soda or bicarbonate 
of soda (hydrogen sodium carbon¬ 
ate). If crude soda (sodium car¬ 
bonate) be melted in hot water and 
cooled in shallow pans, large soda 
crystals will be formed ; and if these 
crystals be then put where carbonic 
acid gas can get at them they will 
take up enough of it to turn the 
crystals into bicarbonate of soda, a 
white powder which contains twice 
as much carbon as sodium carbon¬ 
ate or crude soda. By mixing al¬ 
most any acid or acid salt with bi¬ 
carbonate of soda this carbon will be 
turned into carbonic acid, and pass 
off as gas. Cooks mix with it, in 
making bread, a lktle cream of tar¬ 
tar (see Potassium) which sets free 
the carbonic acid gas, and this puffs 
up the dough and makes it light. 
Rochelle powders or Rochelle salts, 
taken like seidlitz powders as a med¬ 
icine, consist of bicarbonate of soda 
in one paper and cream of tartar in 
another. When the two are mixed 
in water the carbonic acid is set 
free and the liquid foams up like 
SODA WATER. 

The word soda is the same in 
German, Italian, Spanish, and Portu¬ 
guese. In French it is soude. 

SODA WATER (so called because 
first made with soda), a mineral water 
made of carbonic acid and water, 
and flavored with various kinds of 
syrups. Its common name has now 
no meaning, because the soda water 
of the present day has no soda in it. 
Carbonic acid will mix with water at 
the common heat and pressure of 
the air, but if the heat be lessened 
and the pressure be increased much 
more of it can be got into water 
than at the common pressure. In 
making soda water the carbonic acid 
is got by pouring weak sulphuric 
acid over marble dust (calcium 






SODIUM 


575 


SOUND 


carbonate). This sets free the gas, 
which is then forced with a force 
PUMP into the water in a very strong, 
air-tight vessel. The water, thus 
filled with the gas, is then drawn off 
from the vessel in which it was mixed 
into smaller ones called fountains, 
which are sent round in wagons to 
the various places where soda water 
is sold. Some fountains are made 
of cast-steel on the outside and of tin 
on the inside, and others are lined 
with glass, so that the water in 
them is kept much purer than in 
the copper fountains once used. 
Most apothecaries and others who 
sell soda water have handsome mar¬ 
ble cases in which the syrups are 
kept in glass tanks. There is also a 
place to set the fountain in, where it 
is kept surrounded by ice, and the 
water is drawn from it through a 
pipe leading to the front of the mar¬ 
ble case. The soda water is thus 
kept very cold. Many American 
soda water fountains have been sent 
to Europe, and they are now much 
used in all the large cities. 

SODIUM, a METAL and one of the 
principal elements. When pure 
it is silvery-white, very bright, lighter 
than water, and at common heat soft 
as wax. It is never found by itself, 
as it has such a liking for OXYGEN 
that it will unite with it if left where 
it is and form sodium oxide, a 
white powder commonly called soda. 
Therefore it can never be left where 
the air can get at it, nor be kept in 
water, but has to be kept in rock 
oil, which has no oxygen in it. If a 
small piece be thrown on to water, it 
will swim around, just as POTASSIUM 
does, and unite with the oxygen, 
setting the hydrogen free, though 
the heat will not be enough to' set 
fire to the hydrogen ; but if the 
water be hot the hydrogen will take 
fire and burn with a bright yellow 
flame. The metal sodium is very 
useful to the chemist, who makes it 
by taking away the oxygen from 
soda. The salts of sodium are of 
great importance to mankind and are 


much used in the arts. Among the 
most important are common salt 
(sodium chloride), which is made up 
of sodium and chlorine ; Glauber 
salts (sodium sulphate) made up 
of sodium and sulphuric acid ; 
washing soda (sodium carbonate), 
made up of sodium and carbonic 
acid ; and Chili saltpetre (sodium 
nitrate), made up of sodium and 
NITRIC ACID. 

The word sodium is new Latin, 
and is made from SODA. 

SOLDER, an ALLOY which when 
melted is used as a cement to fasten 
together pieces of metal. There 
are many kinds of solder, used by 
different metal workers, such as jew¬ 
ellers, coppersmiths, tinsmiths, and 
plumbers. Nearly all the common 
metals are used in making the differ¬ 
ent kinds, but the solder most used 
is made of tin and lead. This is the 
kind used by tinsmiths and plum¬ 
bers. Coppersmith’s solder is made 
of zinc and copper, and that used by 
silversmiths, of silver and copper. 
In soldering, the edges of the metals 
to be put together must be well 
cleaned and heated hot, and the 
solder, which is laid on them, is then 
melted with an iron called a solder¬ 
ing iron. Sometimes a little borax 
or resin is needed to make the solder 
stick to the parts of the metal, as it 
keeps the metal from oxydizing (see 
Oxygen). Any thing used for this 
purpose is called a flux. The blow¬ 
pipe is often used in soldering. 

The word solder is from the Latin 
solidus, solid. 

SOUND. If you pull and let go 
the string of a violin or guitar you 
will see it vibrate (Latin vibrare, to 
move backward and forward), that 
is, tremble or quiver, and you will 
hear a sound. In like manner, 
when a bell is struck by its clapper, 
it vibrates. Neither the string nor 
the bell moves out of place, but only 
the particles of which they are made 
up vibrate backward and forward. 
Now, vibrating motion has power in 
it and can give a blow as well as the 





SOUND 


576 


SOUND 


motion which moves from place to 
place. If you put your finger against 
a vibrating string or wire you will 
feel a series of little blows. If you do 
not put any thing against the string 
it will give the same blows to the 
air, and will continue them until the 
vibrations stop. Thus, a vibrating 
body gives in a short time a great 
many little blows to the air ; and 
every time the air is hit it strikes the 
air next to it, and this in turn strikes 
the air next to that, and so on until 
the air over a great distance has been 
hit and put into motion. By and by 
the blow reaches our ears and we 
feel it, but not in the way that we 
would feel a blow from a stick ; 
therefore we do not call it a blow, 
but say that a sound has struck our 
ears. This is the way that all 
sounds are brought to us. The 
thing which makes the noise strikes 
the air and the part of the air struck 
gives the blow to the part next to it, 
and so on, and this makes a series of 
waves through the air, w r hich finally 
strikes the drum of our ear, and then 
we hear a sound. Thus, there is 
really no such thing as a sound out¬ 
side of our ears, but only sound 
waves, which do not make any noise 
until they strike a blow on the drums 
of our ears. If we try to ring a bell 
in a place where there is no air, such 
as the receiver of an air-pump, 
there will be nothing for the vibrat¬ 
ing particles of the bell to strike, and 
no sound will come to our ears. 
We can see the clapper strike the 
bell, but we hear no sound. On the 
top of very high mountains, where 
the air is thin, sounds are not nearly 
so loud as in lower places. It is 
said that a pistol fired on the top of 
Mont Blanc makes no more noise 
than a fire-cracker. A person in a 
room which has all the windows and 
doors shut can hear a sound made 
at a distance outside of the room, 
because the waves of air caused by 
the sound strike the windows, doors, 
and walls and make them vibrate, 
and these vibrations make other 


waves in the air inside the room, 
which finally reaches his ears. 

When a person speaks or sings 
sound waves are made in the air in 
the same way as by a violin or guitar 
string, which is pulled and let go. 
There are two little flat chords in our 
throats, stretched across a kind of 
box at the top of the windpipe. The 
air, coming up from our lungs, strikes 
against these chords and makes them 
vibrate or quiver, and they in turn 
give the blows to the air and thus 
make sound waves which cause 
sound inside of our ears. The 
noises of most animals, such as the 
barking of the dog, the mewing of 
the cat, and the lowing of the cow, 
are made in the same way. Fishes 
do not have such a box in their wind¬ 
pipes, because they live always in 
the water, and air is needed to make 
the chords vibrate. Frogs, which 
live both in and out of water, have 
one, but they can croak only when 
their heads are out of water. 

When the thing which causes the 
sound gives but one blow to the air, 
as when a cannon is fired, but one 
blow reaches the ear and we call it 
a noise ; but when a series of blows 
is given, as when a guitar string vi¬ 
brates, the blows come to the ear 
one after the other in regular order, 
and we then call it a musical note. 
If only a few of this series of blows 
are struck in a second of time, the 
musical note will be a deep low one, 
but if the body vibrates so quickly 
that it gives the air a great many 
blows in a second, the note will be 
high and shrill. Thus, when we 
hear a low musical note we know 
that the thing which makes it is vi¬ 
brating very slowly, and when we 
hear a high shrill note, we know that 
it is vibrating very quickly. Musical 
notes are pleasing to the ear, but 
noises are unpleasant, and sometimes 
they do much harm. A large can¬ 
non when fired will often cause such 
strong waves in the air as to shatter 
panes of glass, and sometimes even 
the drum of the ear has been broken. 






SOUND 


577 


SPARROW 


Waves of sound do not travel 
through the air all at once, as 
light appears to do, but take some 
time. When a cannon is fired at a 
distance, you see the flash and 
smoke at once, but the sound does 
not reach you until after a few sec¬ 
onds. The number of seconds de¬ 
pends on the distance, for sound 
travels at the rate of about i ioo feet 
or a little more than one fifth of a 
mile, in a second. If ten men be 
placed in a row, each one i ioo feet 
from the next one, and a gun be 
fired i ioo feet beyond the first one 
or No. i, he will hear the sound in 
just a second after the firing of the 
gun. No. 2 will hear it in two sec¬ 
onds, No. 3 in three seconds. No. 4 
in four seconds, and so on to No. 
10, who will not hear it until ten 
seconds have passed. All sounds, 
loud or soft, high or low,- travel at 
the same rate. If this were not so 
the different notes of music would 
reach the ear at different times and 
make only confusion instead of mel¬ 
ody. 

Sounds will also travel through 
liquids and through many solids. 
They will pass through water nearly 
four times as fast as through air. A 
blow struck by a hammer on a bell 
under water has been heard as far 
as nine miles. If one end of a long 
wooden beam be scratched with a 
pin, the sound may be plainly heard 
by a person who puts his ear to the 
other end, even if the person who 
scratches with the pin cannot hear 
it ; and the sound of a railway train 
may be heard by putting the ear 
down to the rail when it cannot be 
heard through the air. Sound will 
travel through a solid body ten to 
sixteen times as fast as through air. 
Electricity will carry sound waves 
much faster than any thing else, as 
is told about under Telephone. 

When sound waves strike against 
any smooth hard surface, they will 
be reflected, that is, they will spring 
back just as a rubber ball will when 
thrown against a wall. For ex- ' 


ample, if you stand in the mid¬ 
dle of a place surrounded by high 
cliffs and fire a gun, you will hear 
the report of the gun at once, be¬ 
cause the gun is close to you, but 
soon you will hear something else ; 
the sound waves will spread out 
until they strike the cliffs, and being 
unable to go any further will bound 
back and return to you, travelling 
always about 1100 feet in a second. 
In a few seconds the waves of sound 
will come back to your ear and you 
will hear the report of the gun again, 
just as if another gun had been fired. 
This second sound is called an echo. 
Sometimes sound waves bound back 
from several different places, some 
further off than others, and then we 
hear two or three echoes ; and some¬ 
times an echo itself is bounded back 
so as to make a second and a third 
echo. When a cannon is fired 
among mountains many echoes are 
often heard, sounding much like roll¬ 
ing thunder. 

If sound waves can be kept to¬ 
gether so that they cannot spread 
out and waste their force in the air, 
they may be made to go a great dis¬ 
tance. They can be thus kept to¬ 
gether in speaking-tubes, which are 
long tubes of small width put into 
the walls of buildings so that people 
on one floor can talk easily with 
those on other floors. When a per¬ 
son speaks in one end of the tube 
the sound waves are kept in the tube, 
and thus keep most of their force 
until they come out of the other end 
(see Trumpet). 

The word sound is from the Anglo- 
Saxon son, Latin sonus, sound. 

SPARROW. The principal spar¬ 
rows of the United States are the 
song sparrow and the chipping spar¬ 
row, commonly called chip bird or 
chipping bird from its notes, which 
sound like “ cheep-cheep-cheep.” 
The song sparrow, which is reddish 
brown with gray and dark brown 
marks, has a sweet song and sings 
all day long. It goes South in the 
autumn, and returns early in the 





SPIDER 


578 


SPIDER 


spring. The chip bird, which comes 
later, is rather smaller, and is gray¬ 
ish with black markings. It builds 
its nest in trees, and lays four or five 
greenish blue eggs. It is very social 
in its habits, and is seen around 
dwellings oftener than the song 
sparrow. 

The House Sparrows of Europe, 
the little birds seen in many of our 
city parks, differ somewhat from 
our sparrows. They were brought to 
the United States from Manchester, 
England, in 1856, and set free in the 
following spring in Brooklyn, New 
York. They have increased so fast 
that they are now to be found in 
many towns and cities. Their food 
is chiefly seeds and buds, but they 
feed their young on larvae (see IN¬ 
SECTS) and are useful in killing 
caterpillars on trees ; but they are 
quarrelsome little fellows and drive 
away other sparrows, as well as 
robins and bluebirds. Like the chip 
bird, they build their nests in trees 
and lay four or five eggs. 

In New York City the trees were 
being cut down because the canker- 
worms swung on their webs so 
thickly from them that persons often 
had to walk in the middle of the 
street, but the sparrows were sent 
for and soon remedied the evil. 

The sparrow belongs to the order 
insessores , or perching birds, and 
to the finch family. 

The word sparrow is from the 
Anglo-Saxon spearwa , sparrow. 

SPIDER. Spiders are like INSECTS 
in being air-breathing, but are unlike 
them and like the CRUSTACEANS in 
having the head and chest united in 
one ; so that the body, instead of 
being divided into three parts, as in 
insects, is divided into but two, the 
head and chest, and the abdomen. 
They have also eight legs, while in¬ 
sects have but six, and they have no 
wings and no antennae or feelers. 
Spiders, too, do not pass through 
two or three changes in life, like 
many insects, but are born in the 
same shape in which they grow up. 


There are a great many kinds of 
spiders, and they differ in size from 
that of a grain of sand to several 
inches wide. Some are found in all 
parts of the world, and some only in 
a few places. Some live in the fields, 
and some on the water ; some live 
all the time in houses, either in cel¬ 
lars, corners of rooms, or chinks in 
walls, and others seldom enter houses 
unless driven in by cold weather. 

Spiders are flesh-eaters, and their 
mouths are therefore made for 
biting, though they generally suck 
the juices from the bodies of their 
prey instead of eating them. They 
are armed with terrible jaws made 
up of two sharp-pointed hooked 
blades, with saw-like edges. The 
points of these blades shut together 
in the wound when a spider bites, 
and at the same time there is spirted 
from them a colorless poison which 
kills insects. The bite of a spider 
on the back of a man’s hand has 
been known to cause the whole arm 
to swell up to a large size ; but there 
are believed to be no spiders in.the 
United States whose bite will kill a 
healthy man. Spiders usually have 
eight simple eyes, but a few kinds 
have six, and a few only two. There 
is also a kind in the Mammoth 
Cave, Kentucky, which has no-eyes. 

Most spiders spin webs, usually 
called cobwebs, but while some live 
in them, others use them only as 
traps to catch their prey. They sel¬ 
dom move too from place to place 
without spinning a line after them, 
by the use of which they are able to 
drop safely from any height, and 
while hanging by it are often swung 
by the wind across wide spaces with¬ 
out any trouble on their part except 
to let out the thread. Spiders also 
line the crevices in which they pass 
the winter with a coating of silk, and 
they shut up their eggs in a cocpon 
of the same material, in which the 
young remain until they are strong 
enough to take care of themselves. 
Although both sexes spin, most of 
those usually seen in and near webs 






SPIDER 


579 


SPIDER 


are females and young spiders, who 
seldom go far away from them. The 
grown up males are seldom seen 
building webs ; they hide themselves 
during the day and wander around 
from web to web at night. 

Spiders spin their threads from the 
back part of the body, while cater¬ 
pillars spin theirs from the head. 
What looks to the naked eye like a 
single thread is seen, under the MI¬ 
CROSCOPE, to be made up of hun¬ 
dreds of small strands. Inside the 
spider’s body are bags filled with a 
gummy substance, out of which these 
strands are drawn through several 
knobs, called spinnerets, each of 
which is full of tubes so small that 
it is said a thousand of them take 
up no more space than the point of 
a pin. All these little gummy 
strands, which dry as soon as they 
reach the air, come together, just 
outside the spinnerets, and form one 
thread, which is guided by the hind 
feet as it runs out of the body. 
When the spider begins to build a 
web it presses the spinnerets against 
the place where the first thread is to 
start from, and thus fastens the ends 
of the strands of which the thread is 
to be made. After running a few 
threads along the sides of the places 
to which the web is to be fastened, 
it begins the web by carrying one or 
two lines across where its centre is 
to be. Lines are then spun from the 
centre to the sides in all directions, 
and when these are done the spider 
begins near the centre and spins a 
thread spirally, or round and round, 
fastening it to each cross thread as 
it passes, until it reaches the out¬ 
side, the spirals being as far from 
each other as the spider can reach. 
All the thread spun up to this time 
is dry, but now the spider spins a 
final circle on the outer side of the 
web and covers it as it goes with a 
sticky matter, strung along on the 
thread like beads. It continues to 
spin thus back toward the centre, 
again, using the dry threads first laid 
as a scaffold to walk on, destroying 


them as it goes, and replacing them 
with sticky threads. A few of the 
first or dry threads are left around 
the centre, and on these the spider 
places itself, always with the head 
downward, and waits for its prey. 
If an insect now touches one of 
these sticky threads it is held fast 
and its struggles only entangle it the 
more. As soon as the spider feels 
any movement, it runs out to the vic¬ 
tim, seizes it in its jaws and as soon 
as it begins to feel the poison of its 
bite, it covers it with a silken net 
and hangs it up to suck at its leisure. 

In spinning its web the spider keeps 
the threads from tangling with its 
feet. The foot of a spider has three 
claws, which are toothed like a comb, 
as can be seen in the picture, where 
a foot is shown much enlarged. It 
is supposed that the threads are 



Foot of Spider, Enlarged. 


made to run through these combs, 
and are thus kept separate from each 
other. The claws are also used to 
take off from the web any dirt or 
other thing which may get on it. If 
the dirt cannot be easily got off, the 
spider breaks off the part of the web 
on which it is, makes it up into a 
ball and throws it away, and then 
spins that part over again. 

Spiders may often be seen spinning 
a thread which they let float in the 
air, so that the end may be carried 
by the wind against something 
and stick to it. A spider thus spin¬ 
ning will often turn round and try 
the thread to see if the other end 
has caught, and if it finds it has, it 
will run out on it just as it would on 
a thread which it has itself carried 
and fastened. By this means spiders 




SPINACH 


580 


SPONGE 


travel from one high place to another 
and even cross streams. 

Although all spiders spin, they do 
not all make webs like the house 
spider : some weave silken tubes in 
which they dwell, and some, called 
wandering spiders, have no fixed 
home, weaving only threads to catch 
their prey. Some, called mason 
spiders, build nests of clay under 
ground and cover the. sides with a 
thick web, the entrance being 
fitted with a door hung on a kind of 
hinge ; and others build houses of 
leaves in the woods and spread their 
nets to catch their prey in front of 
their doors. There is in Europe a 
water spider, which lives under 
water, where it makes its nest 
and cocoon, which is kept filled 
with air. 

Spiders lay eggs but once a 
year, usually in June. Almost ^ 
all kinds enclose them in a /£;; 
cocoon, in which the young re¬ 
main until they are old enough - 
to take care of themselves. As 
many as two thousand eggs are 
sometimes laid in one cocoon, 
and though many of them 
hatch, but few live to grow up. 

Spiders form the second class /y 
of articulate ANIMALS. This 
class is also called arachnida , 
from the Greek arachne , a 
spider. 

The word spider is changed 
from the old English spinder, 
a spinner, from the Anglo-Saxon 
spinnan, to spin. The word cobweb 
is from the old English cob , spider, 
and the Anglo-Saxon webbe, some¬ 
thing woven. 

SPINACH, a garden plant, the 
leaves of which are boiled and 
eaten as a vegetable. It is supposed 
to have first grown in western Asia 
and to have been brought by the 
Arabs into Spain, whence it was 
carried into other parts of Europe. 

The word spinach is from the 
Latin spina , a thorn, the plant being 
named, as some think, on account 
of its prickly leaves ; but others 


think it is from Hispania, the ancient 
name of Spain. 

SPONGE. Sponges were long 
thought to be vegetables, but they 
are now known to be animals. 
They differ much in form, some 
being cup-shaped, some pear- 
shaped, and some having many 
branches. They grow mostly at 
the bottom of the sea, on rocks, to 
which they are fixed by a kind of 
root, some in deep and some in shal¬ 
low water, and generally in pieces 
from the size of an egg to that of a 
man’s head. In cold climates they 
are usually small, but in hot cli¬ 
mates they are very large and plenti- 



Sponge. 


ful. When first taken out of the 
water sponges are dark-colored and 
look like beef liver. They are made 
up of a jelly-like substance, and 
of a framework of tough fibres. 
This framework, which is really 
the skeleton of the sponge, is what 
is commonly called sponge. When 
looked at through a microscope 
it is seen to be made up of fine 
fibres laced together so as to form 
a great number of holes, some of 
which are large and some very 
small. When alive all this part is 
covered with the jelly-like substance, 
which becomes sticky when taken 










SPRUCE 


581 


SQUIRREL 


out of the water. The sponge gets 
its food from the water which 
washes into it. This water is all 
the time pouring out of the holes in 
the way shown in the picture. 

The sponges of commerce are 
brought mostly from Turkey and 
the West Indies. The finest come 
from off the shores of Candia or 
Crete and Cyprus, where they are 
got chiefly by diving. The divers 
go out in boats and are let down to 
the bottom by ropes with a heavy 
stone at the end. When a diver 
finds sponges he tears them off the 
rocks, puts them under his arms 
and then pulls at the rope as a sig¬ 
nal to his companions to draw him 
up again. 

Large numbers of sponges are 
brought also from the Bahama 
Islands and from the coast of Flor¬ 
ida, but they are much coarser than 
those from the Mediterranean. 
They are usually buried in dry sand 
for a time until the jelly part decays, 
and then are put in wire cages into 
sea-water until they are washed clean. 

The word sponge is from the 
Latin spongia , Greek spoggia, 
sponge. 

SPRUCE, a cone-bearing ever¬ 
green tree, belonging to the same 
family with the pine. The principal 
wild spruces in the United States 
are the black and the white spruce, 
which grow in all the cool parts. 
Their wood, which is very strong 
and light, is used in ship-building, 
especially for masts and spars. 
Good shingles are also made from 
it. Spruce beer is flavored with the 
tender shoots of the black spruce. 
The Norway spruce, so well known 
as a beautiful evergreen, was first 
brought from Norway. 

The word spruce is from the old 
Enghshpruse, Prussian, and the tree 
was so called in England because 
masts made of it were first brought 
from that country. 

SQUASH, the fruit of a plant of 
the GOURD family, to which the 
pumpkin and melon also belong. 


Some kinds of squashes were culti¬ 
vated by the American Indians be¬ 
fore the whites came ; others are 
supposed to have been brought 
from Europe. Summer squashes do 
not have so long vines as those 
raised for winter use, and are gen- 
rally called bush squashes. The 
chief kinds are the round flat ones 
with scalloped edges, called in the 
Southern States cymblings or cym- 
lings, and the crook-necks. The 
best winter squashes are the Boston 
marrow and the Hubbard. 

The word squash is shortened 
from the Massachusetts Indian word 
askuta-squash , vine-apple. 

SQUIRREL. Squirrels are found 
in almost all parts of the world, ex¬ 
cepting Australia and the West In¬ 
dies. They are pretty and graceful 
little animals, with long bushy tails 
which are generally carried over the 
back, and are very nimble in their 
movements. They have large full 
eyes, small pointed ears, and long 
whiskers ; and five toes on the hin¬ 
der feet and four toes and a kind of 
thumb on the fore feet, all armed 
with strong* sharp claws. Most of 
their time is spent in trees, which 
they run up with great ease, leaping 
from branch to branch and often 
from one tree to another. They can 
jump from a high branch to the 
ground without harm, because they 
spread out their legs and tail when 
they fall, and these catch the air and 
hold them up (see Flying Squir¬ 
rel). Squirrels live chiefly on 
acorns and nuts, but they also eat 
the bark, leaf-buds, and tender 
shoots of trees, and sometimes rob 
birds’ nests, eating both eggs and 
young birds. In cold countries 
they lay up a store of food for the 
winter, not only in their nests, but 
in holes and nooks near by. The 
nest is built of twigs, dry leaves and 
moss curiously woven together in 
the hollow or crotch of some old 
tree ; but the Chipmunk digs its 
nest in the ground. 

The Gray Squirrel is the most 










SQUIRREL 


582 


STARS 


common kind in the United States, 
being found in almost all the 
States. It is usually gray on the 
back and whitish below, but black 
ones are occasionally seen. It has 
four to six young, born in May or 
June. They are easily tamed, if 
taken from their nests when small, 
and are often kept as pets in wheel 
or turn-about cages ; but these are 
very uncomfortable things and keep 
a squirrel in misery by making him 
run up a hill which is all the time 
sliding out from under him. A pet 
squirrel should be kept in a cage at 
least six feet long and four feet 
high, or large enough for a good- 
sized boy to get into, fitted with 
perches like the branches of trees, 
and a neat little box into which 
it can creep to have a quiet sleep. 
Care should be taken to keep this 
clean, and the food box and water 
dish, which should be of glass, 
should be kept clean also. Squirrels 
should be fed on nuts, such as wal¬ 
nuts, hickory nuts, filberts, almonds, 
and beech nuts. They also like 
milk, and will eat bread and milk 
with pleasure. Squirrels may be 
made very interesting pets if care be 
taken in training them, and they may 
be taught to know and love their 
master, and to come at his call. 

The Red Squirrel is nearly as 
common in the Northern and Mid¬ 
dle States as the gray squirrel. It 
is called also the pine squirrel from 
its love of pine seeds, the chickaree 
from its loud chatter, and the Hud¬ 
son Bay squirrel. Its fur is mixed 
black and rusty-gray above and 
whitish below. Red squirrels are 
industrious little fellows and livelier 
than gray ones, but are less gentle 
and not so easily tamed. Gray 
squirrels lie in their nests in very 
cold weather in a kind of numb 
state, but red squirrels run around 
all winter long, and they therefore 
lay up a good deal more food in the 
autumn than gray ones. 

In some parts of the United States 
squirrels are so plentiful that they 


destroy whole fields of wheat and 
corn, and farmers have great trouble 
in getting rid of them. In Califor¬ 
nia many thousands have been killed 
on one farm in a single season. A 
great many are killed for their furs, 
which are worn by women and chil¬ 
dren as trimmings and linings for 
clothes. Sometimes the fur is dyed 
to look like sable. The tails are used 
in making boas and artists’ pencils. 

The squirrel is a MAMMAL of the 
order rodentia , or gnawing animals. 

The word squirrel is from the 
Greek skiouros , shadow-tail, which 
is from skid , shade or shadow, and 
our a, tail. 

STARS. The shining bodies 
which we see in the sky at night may 
be divided into planets and stars. 
The planets belong to the solar sys¬ 
tem (see Universe), but the stars 
are all outside of it. Stars twinkle, 
but planets shine with a steady light. 
In ancient times the stars were 
called fixed stars, because they do 
not move from each other in the 
heavens, and the name is still given 
to them. This was to distinguish 
them from the planets, which are 
all the time changing their places. 
But while the stars keep the same 
places in regard to each other, they 
look as if they had a regular daily 
motion. Most of them appear to 
rise in the east and set in the west, 
but they do not really move in that 
way, and only look so because the 
earth is all the time turning round. 
It is known, however, that some of 
the stars really move, and it is sup¬ 
posed that all are in motion, some 
going along in a path and some turn¬ 
ing round each other. 

Some of the stars look much 
brighter than others. We do not 
know exactly why this is, for we can¬ 
not tell whether some are really 
brighter than others, or whether 
some only shine brighter because 
they are larger or are nearer to us. 
In the best TELESCOPES the brightest 
stars do not appear, like the planets, 
as globes, but only as little points of 






STARS 


583 


STARS 


light. It is therefore impossible to 
tell how large they are, or how far 
off they are ; but it is thought that 
none of them are smaller than our 
sun, and that many of them are 
several hundred times larger. It is 
probable that each one of them is a 
sun like our sun, and is the centre 
of a system of planets like our own. 
The distance of a few of the ones 
nearest to us has been measured 
and found to be more than five 
hundred thousand times as far as 
our sun is from us. This is the 
reason why they look so small to 
us and why we cannot see their 
planets even with the strongest 
telescopes. 

The stars are not only of different 
brightnesses, but are also of differ¬ 
ent colors. This can be seen better 
with a telescope than with the eye 
alone. Some look white, others 
yellow, orange, red, green, blue, 
lilac, olive, and gray. Some stars 
are double, that is, two stars are so 
close that one turns round the 
other; and sometimes there are 
more than two turning round each 
other. In some cases each of the 
stars is of a different color, so that, 
if they have planets rolling round 
them, as our sun has, their planets 
would have two suns, each giving 
different colored light. 

The stars are divided by astron¬ 
omers into classes according to 
their brightness. These classes are 
called magnitudes, the brightest 
ones being said to be of the first 
magnitude, the next brightest of the 
second magnitude, and so on. 
There are only about 20 stars of the 
first magnitude, 65 of the second, 
190 of the third, 425 of the fourth, 
1100 of the fifth, and 3200 of the 
sixth ; while of the ninth magnitude 
as many as 142,000 have been 
counted. Stars of the sixth mag¬ 
nitude give so faint a light that only 
the best eyes can see them, and 
those beyond this magnitude can¬ 
not be seen without a telescope. 
When we look up into the heavens 


the stars appear to be countless, but 
we can really see only about 3000 
with the naked eye on the clearest 
night. But it is very different 
when we look through a telescope, 
for we then see millions of stars 
which give too faint a light for our 
eyes alone to take in. The band 
of whitish light stretching across 
the sky, usually called the milky 
way, is seen to be made up of count¬ 
less numbers of small stars, which 
appear to be so close together that 
they look like a mass of light ; but 
they are not really close together, 
and only look so because they are 
so far away. There are also clus¬ 
ters of stars scattered over the heav¬ 
ens, made up of thousands of stars 
so small that they look to the eye 
only like a dull patch of light, but 
which are seen through a telescope 
to be separate stars. Some of these 
clusters cannot be split up into 
stars, but still look only like patches 
of light even through the largest 
telescopes. These are called nebulae 
(Latin nebula , plural nebulce y a 
cloud) to distinguish them from 
clusters of stars. Some look like a 
patch of light with a star in its mid¬ 
dle, and these are called nebulous 
stars. It is not known exactly what 
the nebulae are, but some think 
they are masses of blazing gases 
which grow smaller and smaller 
until they turn into nebulous stars ; 
and that the clouds of light around 
these stars form rings, something 
like the rings of Saturn, which in 
time break and make planets. 
Meanwhile the star in the centre 
gets thicker and hotter and finally 
shines like a sun, giving light and 
heat to the planets rolling round it, 
just as our sun does. Some think 
that our solar system and all the 
other star systems grew in this way 
out of a mass of burning gases, 
much like the nebulae which the 
telescope shows to us. 

The word star is from the Anglo- 
Saxon steorra , from the Greek 
aster , star. 





STARCH 


584 


STAR FISH 


STARCH. Most people think of 
starch only as a substance used by 
washerwomen for stiffening linen ; 
but it really forms a large part of the 
food of man. It is in all the vege¬ 
table substances that we eat, and 
especially in the grains used for 
food, which are largely made up of 
it. Rice is nearly nine tenths starch, 
and Indian corn and barley more 
than two thirds starch ; rye, oats, 
and wheat contain nearly as much, 
and potatoes are one fifth starch. 
Arrowroot and tapioca are 
kinds of starch made from the roots 
of plants, and SAGO is starch made 
from the pith of the sago palm 
tree. 

Starch may be easily made. 
Scrape or grate a potato to a pulp ; 
mix this with water and squeeze it 
through a cloth several times. The 
woody fibre of the potato will re¬ 
main in the cloth, while the water 
will have a milky look caused by 
the starch it carries away. Let the 
water stand until the starch set¬ 
tles to the bottom, then pour off the 
water and dry the starch. Wheat 
starch may be made in a similar 
way. Mix a handful of flour with 
water enough to make a thin paste. 
Put this into a cloth and work it with 
more water as long as the liquid 
which runs from it looks milky. Let 
it settle, pour off the water, and dry 
the starch as before. The sticky 
substance left in the cloth after the 
starch is all washed out is GLUTEN. 

Starch looks like a white powder, 
but if examined under the MICRO¬ 
SCOPE it is seen to be made up of 
little round or oval grains. These 
differ in size and looks in different 
kinds of starch, the grains of potato 
starch being more than three times 
as large as those of wheat starch, 
and ten times as large as those of 
rice starch. When starch is boiled 
the coverings of these little grains 
burst and they swell up into a thick 
jelly. This is the reason why beans, 
rice, and other grains swell up when 
they are cooked. 


Starch is made up of just the same 
ELEMENTS as sugar, that is, of 
CARBON, HYDROGEN, and OXYGEN; 
but not in quite the same quantities. 
Each has in it about the same 
amount of carbon, but starch has 
less hydrogen and oxygen in it than 
sugar. By adding enough of these 
to make up the difference, starch 
may be turned into SUGAR. 

When dry starch is heated to 205 
degrees, or nearly as hot as boiling 
water, it gradually becomes brown 
and is turned into dextrine, which 
differs from starch in many things. 
When mixed with water it forms a 
strong gum, sometimes called British 
gum, used on postage stamps, and 
also by calico printers for thickening 
their colors and for stiffening cali¬ 
coes. 

The word starch is from the 
Anglo-Saxon stearc, stark or stiff. 

STAR FISH. The common star 
fish, called sometimes five fingers, 
and five-fingered Jack, is often seen 
along the New England coast. It 
is shaped like a five-pointed star, 
has a rough upper side, and great 
numbers of little feet on the under 
side, which are hollow and may be 
used like suckers, so that the ani¬ 
mal can walk up the side of a 
smooth rock in the water. Star fish 
walk with these over the bottom of 
the sea and catch their food with 
them. Their mouth is in the mid¬ 
dle of the lower part. 

Most star fish have five arms of 
equal length, but there are some 
kinds with more arms. Different 
kinds differ much in color, some 
being grayish-yellow, some orange- 
yellow, some reddish, and some red¬ 
dish-purple. All of them live in the 
sea, and none in fresh water. If one 
be taken from salt water and put 
into cold fresh water, it will die at 
once. Many are found in shallow 
water on sandy coasts, but some 
kinds have been taken from very 
deep water. They are more plenti¬ 
ful in the seas of hot than in those 
of cold countries. Several kinds of 







STAR FISH 


585 


STATUE 


common star fish are shown in the 
picture. 

Star fish are very greedy, and 
their sole business seems to be to 
eat. They live largely on decaying 
animal matter, thus doing the same 
service in the sea which vultures and 
some insects do on land. They also 
feed on crustaceans, small fish, 
and mollusks. It is said that they 
eat many oysters, which they force 
to open their shells by spirting a 
few drops of a poisonous liquid on 
their edges. When the oyster opens, 
it catches it with its arms and swal¬ 
lows it little by little. 


The star fish belongs to the sub¬ 
kingdom of radiate animals. 

The star fish gets its name from 
its shape. 

STATUE. There are different 
kinds of statues, but they are gen¬ 
erally either cut with chisels and 
other tools out of stone, or cast 
in metal. In beginning a marble 
statue, it is usual to make a small 
sketch or design of it in potter’s clay, 
and afterward to make from this a 
larger one, called the model, which 
the artist corrects and makes as per¬ 
fect as he can while the clay is soft. 

When this is done it is cast in 



Star Fish. 


plaster, but first a mould has to be 
made. The model is made pretty 
wet, so that the moisture in the plas¬ 
ter of Paris will not be taken up too 
quickly by soaking into the clay, and 
a soft mixture of plaster of Paris and 
water is spread over it. This is put 
on in parts, the front of the head and 
chest being usually first covered. 
As soon as the plaster sets or hard¬ 
ens, which takes only a few minutes, 
it is taken off and more plaster is 
spread over the back part of the 
head and chest. Thus the whole 
body down to the waist is moulded 
in two parts, and the rest of the 
mould is made in the same way. 


Sometimes the whoje statue is 
smeared over with the soft plaster, 
and cut up into several parts with a 
fine thin saw after it has set. After 
the mould is made it is cleaned by 
brushing it with a soft brush and 
water, and the parts are fitted to¬ 
gether and bound by a cord or rope, 
the seams being carefully filled up on 
the inside so as to be perfectly 
smooth. The mould is then wet 
with water and a mixture of plaster 
of Paris and water, made about as 
thick as cream, is poured in, a little 
at a time, while the mould is turned 
round in such a way as to cause the 
plaster to run all over the inside sur- 












STATUE 


586 


STATUE 


face. As ihe plaster hardens very 
fast, a thin shell is thus made all over 
the inside of the mould. When the 
plaster is well set, the mould is cut 
off with a chisel and hammer, great 
care being taken not to hurt the cast¬ 
ing inside, which will be an exact 
copy of the clay model. All plaster 
busts and figures are made in this 
way ; but if many of one kind are to 
be made, a second mould is built up 
from this plaster cast, and so ar¬ 
ranged in pieces that they may be tak¬ 
en apart, so as to let the casting out, 
and then put together again to make 
another casting. 

The plaster cast thus made is used 
by the artist as a model for his mar¬ 
ble statue. All the rough work on 
the marble is done by common work¬ 
men, the sculptor himself putting on 
only the fine touches which finish it. 
In cutting the rough block the work¬ 
men have measuring tools by which 
they are able to cut the marble down 
to the exact shape of the model. 
After the chiselling is done, the sur¬ 
face is smoothed off with PUMICE or 
sand. 

Metal Statues are usually cast in 
two to six pieces, the parts being 
put together afterward and joined so 
nicely that the seams cannot be seen. 
This is because the metal is apt to 
cool unevenly when cast in large 
pieces, and to crack. The mould 
for a metal statue is usually made of 
a kind of fine.loam or sand, which 
sticks well together when pounded. 
The model of the statue is laid in a 
strong iron box called a flask, on a 
bed of loam, and more loam is then 
packed and hammered tightly in sec¬ 
tions or parts all over it. Each sec¬ 
tion is so made that it can be taken 
off. This has to be done with the 
utmost care, and it sometimes takes 
weeks and even months to make a 
mould for a full-length statue. Iron 
rods are put through each section 
and little channels are made in them 
for the melted metal to run in. 
When the mould is done, the sec¬ 
tions are taken apart, and the model 


is taken out. Some of the sections 
are then again fitted together in the 
flask, and as they are built up, the 
middle part, from which the model 
was taken out, is filled up with loam 
mixed with a little molasses or paste 
and rammed down tightly. An iron 
frame is fitted inside to make it 
stronger, and one or more tubes are 
put in to carry off the gases when 
the melted metal is poured in. 
When the mould has been put to¬ 
gether piece by piece and the inside 
all filled up, it is again taken apart, 
and the middle, which is called the 
“core,” and which is exactly like 
the model, is taken out, set upright, 
and its whole surface carefully pared 
down with sharp tools until enough 
has been cut to make it so much 
smaller than the outer mould that 
when the two are put together again 
there will be a space about half an 
inch wide between them, into which 
the metal is to be poured. Both 
it and the outer mould are then 
baked in an oven until dry, when 
the core is put back into the flask 
and the mould again built up around 
it, the core being held exactly in 
its place by the iron rods which 
fit into the sections of the mould. 
When the statue is cast in a .single 
piece the mould is usually set up¬ 
side down, and the metal is poured 
into holes in the base. The flask 
is tightly fastened together with 
iron bolts to keep the mould from 
opening during the casting. The 
metal, which is usually BRONZE, 
is melted in a furnace, then drawn 
off into a CRUCIBLE and poured 
in. When the metal is cool the 
flask is opened, the mould knocked 
to pieces, and the core dug out. 
The statue is now in a very rough 
state, and has to be chiselled off, 
filed down smooth, and finally 
chased with different kinds of 
tools before it is ready to be set 
up. 

The word statue is from the Latin 
statua , an image or statue, which is 
from stare , to stand. 







STEAM 


587 


STEAM 


STEAM, water in its gaseous form 
(see Element). Steam has no 
color, is lighter than common air, 
and is invisible, that is, it cannot be 
seen. The white cloud which you 
see coming out of the spout of a 
tea-kettle when water is boiled in it 
is not steam, but steam turned into 
FOG. If you look close to the spout 
of the kettle, you will see a clear 
space between the end of the spout 
and the white cloud. The steam is 
there, although you cannot see it. 
As soon as it reaches the cool air it 
condenses, that is, it becomes thick, 
and the little particles of water form 
a cloud, just as fog is formed in the 
air. If the cloud could be caught in 
a close and cool vessel, it would 
turn back into water again ; but as 
it floats off it grows thinner and 
thinner and becomes a part of the 
moisture of the air. 

When water is heated over a fire, 
the heat has two things to do : first, 
it has to heat the water, and second, 
it has to turn the water into steam. 
The water begins to heat at the bot¬ 
tom, where it is nearest to the fire. 
As it warms it rises to the top and 
cool water comes down to take its 
place ; and so it keeps moving up 
and down till all has become heated. 
When the water gets very hot, steam 
begins to be made at the bottom. 
A simmering noise is heard, and 
little bubbles of steam begin to rise 
up through the water. If water be 
boiled in a glass vessel, you can easi¬ 
ly see the bubbles. Soon the bub¬ 
bles grow larger and larger, as the 
water gets hotter, and they rise so 
fast through the water that they 
make a bubbling sound. We then 
say that the water boils ; so that the 
boiling of water is only the rising of 
steam bubbles through it. 

Steam is really passing off from 
water all the time, whether it boils 
or does not boil. If you lay a wet 
cloth out in the sun, or hang it before 
the fire, it. dries, that is, the water in 
it turns into steam and goes off into 
the air. The water which rises from 


the ocean, and from lakes and rivers 
into the air is also steam. But 
when steam is given out by water 
which is not boiling, we call it evap¬ 
oration (from Latin vapor , steam or 
vapor) ; and it is only when the 
water is heated enough to make 
steam rise from its bottom in bub¬ 
bles that we call it boiling. At the 
common pressure of the air, water 
will boil in an open vessel when it 
is heated so hot that a thermom¬ 
eter put into it will rise to 212 0 of 
Fahrenheit’s scale ; but if the pres¬ 
sure of the air be made less, it will 
boil with less heat. On the top of 
Mont Blanc, which is about three 
miles high, water will boil when 
heated only enough to raise the 
thermometer to 185 ° F. This is not 
heat enough to cook with, and a 
traveller would try in vain to boil an 
egg at such a height, because, 
although his water would boil, there 
would not be heat enough in it to 
harden the ALBUMEN of the egg. 
If the pressure of the air be made 
greater than it is commonly, it will 
take more than enough heat to raise 
the thermometer to 21 2° to make it 
boil. 

Steam is very elastic, that is, it 
has in it a great deal of springiness. 
Neither water nor steam can be 
heated above 212 0 in an open vessel 
at the common pressure of the air ; 
but under great pressure the heat of 
both can be raised very high, and 
the elasticity or springiness of the 
steam grows with the heat. When 
steam is shut up in a tight, strong 
vessel, like the boiler of a steam 
engine, and heated, its elasticity may 
become so great that no vessel can 
stand the pressure. Many steam 
boilers are burst by heating steam 
too much. When a steam engine is 
going, the steam is used up as fast 
as it is made, but when the engine 
stops, the steam collects in the boiler, 
and the engineer opens the valve and 
lets out some of it. The noise which 
it makes in rushing out shows how 
powerful it is. If this were not 




STEAM ENGINE 


588 


STEAM ENGINE 


done the steam might burst the 
boiler. Sometimes a boiler is burst 
in another way. The water in it 
gets very low, and the fire therefore 
heats it very hot. If water be then 
let into it, a great deal of steam is 
made all at once, so much that the 
boiler cannot stand it, and it blows 
up. When water is turned into 
steam the steam fills about seventeen 
hundred times as much room as the 
water did from which it was made. 
This shows the great strength of 
steam. When it is shut up it tries 
to spread out so as to fill this space, 
and if it is stopped by any thing it 
breaks through it. For this reason 
it has to be watched very carefully 
when used in engines, or it will do 
much damage. 

The principal use of steam is to 
work locomotive and other steam 
ENGINES, but it is also used for 
heating houses and other buildings, 
melting solids, heating liquids, and 
for many other purposes. 

The word steam is from the Anglo- 
Saxon stein , vapor or smoke. 

STEAM ENGINE. The principle 
of the steam engine may be seen 
in the first picture, which shows 
a glass tube or cylinder, 
ending in a bulb, A, 
and having a piston, B, 
working up and down in 
it, but so closely as to be 
air-tight. Put into the 
bulb a little water and 
make it boil by holding a 
lamp under it. The 
water will be turned into 
steam, which will force 
the piston up to the top 
of the tube. If the bulb be 

Cylinder then cooled in water,the 
and Piston. steam wiU be con densed 

or turned back into water, and the 
pressure of the outside air will drive 
the piston down again. By thus 
heating the water in the bulb and by 
cooling it the piston may be forced 
up and down any number of times. 
The reason is easy to understand : 
the steam drives the piston up be¬ 



cause it is strong enough to overcome 
the pressure of the outside air ; but 
as soon as the steam is condensed 
into water again the space which it 
filled becomes a vacuum, that is, it 
becomes empty, and the pressure of 
the air drives the piston down to fill 
it. It is just the same in the steam 
engine, only the piston is forced 
both ways by steam, which is first 
let in on one side and then on the 
other side. You will see how this 
is by looking carefully at the second 
picture, which shows a condensing 
steam engine. 

The Condensing Engine, which is 
so called because the steam is con¬ 
densed after being used, is still 
much the same as it was when first 
made by James Watt a little more 
than a hundred years ago (1763). 
In the picture A is the boiler, which 
is shaped like a cylinder, that is 
long and round like a barrel, and is 
made of thick iron plates. It is filled 
about two-thirds full of water, and 
a fire is made on the grate B under 
it. The water has to be kept at 
about the same height all the time, 
and the engineer can tell whether it 
is right or not by turning the stop¬ 
cocks marked D. One of these ends 
below the water and one above it. 
If the water in the boiler is right, 
steam will come out oj the short one 
and water out of the long one ; but 
if the water is too high, water will 
come out of both, and if it is too low, 
steam will come out of both. On 
the top of the boiler is an opening, 
in which is fitted a safety-valve, E. 
This valve is fastened to a little rod 
which has a weight hung on the end 
of it. The weight keeps the valve 
in its place until the steam in the 
boiler becomes so strong that it is 
able to lift it, and then the valve is 
pushed up and some of the steam 
escapes. If it were not for the safe¬ 
ty-valve many more boilers would 
burst than we now hear about. 

The cylinder of an engine is the 
long, round, tight iron barrel or tube 
in which the piston works. In the 
















STEAM ENGINE 


589 


STEAM ENGINE 


picture the cylinder, C, is cut in 
two, up and down, so that the in¬ 
side can be seen. The piston, which 
is shown near the top of the cylin¬ 
der, and which is fastened to the 
piston-rod M, is fitted into the 
cylinder so that it will move up and 
down in it, but so closely as to be 
air-tight. The piston is moved by 
steam which comes from the boiler 
through the large pipe F. This 


pipe leads the steam into the valve- 
box, H, from which two curved 
pipes, I and I, carry it first to the 
top and then to the bottom of the 
cylinder. In the valve-box is a 
valve called a slide-valve (because it 
slides up and down), fastened to 
the rod K, which is worked by a 
piece called an eccentric, going round 
the shaft or axle of the great wheel 
at L. By means of this the slide- 



Condensing or Low-Pressure Steam Engine. 


valve is made to move first down, 
so as to leave open the upper tube 
I, at the same time closing the lower 
one, and then up, so as to open the 
lower one and close the upper one. 
In this way the steam is first let into 
the top of the cylinder and then into 
the bottom of the cylinder. 

After the steam has moved the 
piston either up or down in the 
cylinder, it passes into the pipe P, 


which leads into the condenser Q. 
The condenser stands in a cistern, 
R R, filled with cold water, a jet of 
which passes through the little pipe 
S, and condenses the steam into 
water again. As this water is warm, 
it is pumped by the pump T into 
the hot-water well U, whence a 
pipe leads up to the pump V, which 
carries it back to the boiler. A cold- 
water pump, W, keeps the well full 


































































































STEAM ENGINE 


590 


STEAM ENGINE 


of cold water. All these pumps are 
worked by rods connected with the 
working-beam. 

The piston rod, M, is connected 
with one end of the working-beam, 
Z, and is made to move straight 
up and down in the cylinder by 
means of two rods, one of which is 
fastened at Y, and the other to the 
frame of the engine at J. From the 
other end of the working-beam a 
rod N extends down and turns the 
crank, which moves the great fly¬ 
wheel O O. The fly-wheel is very 
heavy, being made of iron, and is 
intended to give a steady motion to 
the engine, which would move 
somewhat jerky without it. 

It is now easy to understand how 
the engine works. Let us suppose 
that the cylinder, C, is full of steam, 
which has just pushed the piston up 
in the same way in which it pushed 
up the piston in the glass tube. 
The slide-valve now moves down, 
as shown in the picture. This 
opens the upper pipe I, so as to 
let the steam into the top of the 
cylinder and drive the piston down 
to the bottom, and at the same time 
lets out the steam in the cylinder 
below the piston into the pipe P, 
which carries it into the condenser 
Q, whence it is sent back as water 
into the boiler. The slide-valve 
then moves up. This opens the 
lower pipe I, so as to let the steam 
into the bottom of the cylinder and 
drive the piston up, letting out at the 
same time the steam in the cylinder 
above the piston into the pipe P, 
which carries it into the condenser, 
as before. And thus it goes on, the 
piston being first driven one way 
and then the other, and the steam 
above or below it being condensed 
so as to let the fresh steam act. If 
the steam should be left in the cyl¬ 
inder after pushing the piston one 
way or the other, the piston could 
not be moved again, because this 
steam would be just as strong as 
the new steam which the sliding- 
valve would let in. It must, there¬ 


fore, be got rid of, and this is done 
in this kind of engine by condensa¬ 
tion, or turning it into water. In 
what is called the high-pressure en¬ 
gine, the steam is not condensed, 
but is let out into the air through a 
valve each time the piston goes up 
and down in the cylinder. This is 
the simplest kind of engine, because 
it does not need any condenser or 
cistern of cold water. High-pres¬ 
sure engines are used on railroads 
and in steamboats on the Missis¬ 
sippi and many other Southern riv¬ 
ers. They are more dangerous 
than condensing, or low-pressure 
engines, because they have to use 
much more steam. When the 
waste steam is let out of the cylin¬ 
der the air rushes in and takes its 
place, and presses so hard against 
the piston that it takes much more 
steam to drive it down than in the 
condensing engine, where, after the 
steam is condensed, there is a vac¬ 
uum, or an empty space, on one 
side of the piston, so that it takes 
but little fresh steam to drive it 
down. 

The governor of a steam-engine is 
a little machine which governs the 
supply of steam, that is, lets into the 
cylinder just the right quantity of 
steam. In the picture the governor 
is shown at X. In the pipe, F, 
which carries the steam from the 
boiler to the cylinder, is a valve, G, 
called the throttle-valve, by which 
the pipe may be opened or closed. 
A rod connects this valve with the 
governor, which is made to turn 
round by a belt from the fly-wheel, 
and the faster the fly-wheel moves 
the faster the governor will go round. 
At the lower end of the governor are 
two heavy balls so hung that if it 
goes fast they will swing further out 
from the centre rod, and if it goes 
slow they will swing nearer to it. 
This opens and shuts the throttle- 
valve G, by raising and lowering the 
rod which leads from the governor 
to it, and so the supply of steam is 
regulated. If the engine goes too 




STEEL 


591 


STENCIL 


fast, the balls of the governor swing 
out, and this pulls on the rod and 
partly closes the valve, so as to 
shut off some of the steam ; and if 
it goes too slow the balls swing in¬ 
ward and thus open the valve and 
let in more steam. Thus the speed 
of the engine is ruled by the gov¬ 
ernor. 

The strength of a steam-engine is 
commonly marked by its horse¬ 
power. By one horse power is 
meant a force strong enough to raise 
up 33,000 pounds one foot high in a 
minute ; this being found to be about 
what a very strong horse could do 
working eight hours a day. An 
engine of one hundred horse power 
would be able to do a hundred times 
as much as this. A steamboat of 
1000 tons generally has an engine of 
360 horse power. 

STEEL, a compound of iron and 
CARBON. It has in it a little more 
carbon than wrought iron, and a lit¬ 
tle less than cast iron ; is harder, 
denser, smoother, finer, and more 
elastic or springy than iron, takes a 
brighter polish and does not rust 
so quickly as iron. It may be made 
by heating bars of wrought iron for 
eight or ten days with powdered 
charcoal in an air-tight furnace 
called a cementing furnace. The 
heat is not strong enough to melt the 
iron nor to turn the carbon of the 
charcoal to vapor, but the carbon is 
thus forced into the substance of the 
iron, turning it into steel. When 
taken out of the furnace the bars are 
covered with blisters, and hence are 
called blistered steel. Blistered 
steel may be. made into rough arti¬ 
cles at once, but for making fine 
things it must first be hammered. 
The bars are cut up into short 
pieces (about eighteen inches), half 
a dozen of them are bound together 
and heated red-hot in a furnace, 
and then put under a tilt-HAMMER, 
which gives them a shower of 
blows, welds them together and 
makes them into a single bar of 
smooth, dense steel. This is called 


shear steel, because it is the kind 
used for making shears, and most 
common cutting instruments. Cast 
steel is still finer than shear steel. 
It is made from blistered steel by 
melting it in crucibles in a wind fur¬ 
nace, where a very intense heat is 
got by letting plenty of air in under 
the grate. When the steel is melted 
it is poured out into moulds of cast 
iron and made into short bars 
called ingots. It is then ready to 
be forged and rolled out into thinner 
bars like tilted steel, but as it is 
denser and harder more care has to 
be taken with it. 

Cast steel is now made in a quicker 
way by what is called the Bessemer 
process, because first found out by 
Henry Bessemer, an Englishman. 
Cast iron, first melted in a furnace, 
is drawn off into a large covered 
CRUCIBLE, so swung on pivots 
that it can be easily tipped up and 
emptied. Through holes in the bot¬ 
tom of the crucible a blast of air is 
forced up into the melted metal. 
This causes a great heat which rap¬ 
idly burns out the carbon. After 
about a quarter of an hour a little of 
another kind of iron is thrown in, 
and the blast kept up a few minutes 
longer. When done the metal is 
poured out into a great ladle, and 
thence into moulds and made into 
ingots. The best kinds of cutlery 
are made from cast steel, and it is 
also largely used for casting cannon, 
and for making rails, bridges, ma¬ 
chinery, and ships. 

The word steel is from the Anglo- 
Saxon stel, steel. 

STENCIL, a thin plate of metal, 
pasteboard, or other thin material, 
with a pattern or letters cut through 



Stencil Plate. 


it, as shown in the picture. When 
used the plate is laid flat on the sur¬ 
face to be stencilled, and a brush 







STEREOSCOPE 


592 


STEREOSCOPE 


dipped in paint is rubbed over it. In 
this way patterns or letters are easi¬ 
ly painted on any flat surface. Walls 
of rooms are thus colored quickly 
and cheaply. Stencil plates are 
much used by merchants for paint¬ 
ing names on boxes and barrels. 

STEREOSCOPE, an instrument 
by the aid of which two flat pic¬ 
tures appear to our eyes to be united 
into one, and raised up so as to look 
solid. When you look at a thing 
with both eyes, each eye sees differ¬ 
ently. For instance, suppose that 
you are looking at a statue ; the 
right eye sees all the front part and a 
little of the right side, and the left 
eye all the front part and a little of 
the left side. Thus, both eyes to¬ 
gether see the front part and a little 
of each of the sides, and it is by 
the union of these two images in the 
eyes that the statue is made to look 
solid instead of flat. To make a pic¬ 
ture of a statue appear real to us, it 
ought, therefore, to be shown in 
the two different ways in which it 
is seen by our eyes. This can be 
done by taking two photographs of 
the statue, one from the point from 
which the right eye would look at it, 
and the other from the point from 
which the left eye would view it. 
These two pictures may look to you 
to be exactly alike, but they are not, 
for one is the image which your 
right eye sees and the other the 
image seen by your left eye. If now 
these two pictures can be placed 
one on top of the other, so that they 
shall make but a single image in 
your eyes, this image will appear in 
relief, or to stand out from the 
paper so as to look solid, just as the 
real statue does to your naked eyes. 
This is done by the stereoscope, 
which is usually made up of a small 
box with a place at the back for slid¬ 
ing the pictures in, and two eye¬ 
glasses to look at them with. When 
you look through these eye-glasses 
the two pictures appear like a single 
picture placed in the middle between 
the two, and all their parts stand 


out from the paper as if they were 
solid and real. 

You will best understand the rea¬ 
son of this by looking at the picture, 
where D and E are the two pictures 
at the end of the box, M and N the 
two eye-glasses, and A and B your 
two eyes. In the article Light is 
told that when a ray of light is made 
to pass through a prism, it is re¬ 
fracted, or bent, toward the thick 
part of the prism. Now the two 
eye-glasses are really only prisms, 
though their surfaces are ground so 
as to be a little curved or rounding. 
Rays of light from the picture at D, 
after passing through the prism M, 
are therefore bent toward the thick 



part and thus go into the eye at A 
just as if they came from C, while 
rays from the picture at E, after 
passing through the prism N, are 
bent so as to go into the eye at B 
just as if they came from C. Thus 
the rays from the two pictures reach 
the two eyes as if they all came from 
a single picture placed at C between 
the two real pictures D and E ; and 
this picture has united in it all the 
different parts of the two pictures so 
that it looks solid as things do in 
nature. 

The word stereoscope is made up 
of the Greek words stereos , solid, 
and skopein, to see. 









STILTS 


593 


STOMACH 


STILTS, sticks or crutches to 
raise the feet up above the ground 
in walking. Common stilts used by 
boys are only playthings, but in 
some countries stilts are much used 
in travelling. In the south-west 
part of France are large plains 
called the Landes, which are often 
Hooded in parts with water, as shown 
in the picture. In crossing these 
plains, where the water is not gen¬ 
erally deep enough for boats, high 
stilts are worn most of the time by 
both men and women, who thus are 
able to keep their feet dry. They are 
not held by the hands, like the stilts 


used by boys, but are firmly strapped 
to the side of the leg, and the per¬ 
son wearing them carries a long 
pole in the hand to balance himself 
and to aid him in walking. This 
pole usually has a cross-piece on the 
upper end, like the head of a crutch, 
and by putting it at a slant on the 
ground behind him the person on 
stilts can sit down on it and rest, 
looking in this position much like a 
tripod or three-legged stool. Men 
and women may often be seen in 
that country, perched in this way 
upon high stilts, and knitting while 
they watch their sheep. They wear 



Stilts in the Landes. 


their stilts all day long, putting them 
on when they go out in the morning 
and taking them off only when they 
return home at night. So used are 
they to them that they can travel 
long distances on them without get¬ 
ting tired ; and as they are able to 
take very long steps they can go 
much faster than a man on foot. 

STOCKING, a covering for the 
foot and leg, usually knit or woven. 
In old times stockings were made 
out of pieces of cloth, sewed to¬ 
gether. They were afterward knit 
by hand with knitting-needles, and 
many are still made in this way in 


country places, but most stockings 
sold in stores are now made by 
machinery. There are many differ¬ 
ent kinds of knitting machines, some 
of which knit not only stockings, 
but other goods also, such as gloves, 
mits, undershirts, drawers, scarfs, 
and comforters. 

The word stocking is from stock, 
Anglo-Saxon stocc , a stock or 
trunk, and means a covering for the 
stock or stump, that is, the leg. 

STOMACH. In the article Blood 
is told that the blood is all the time 
being renewed and made good by 
food. The food which we eat be- 









STOMACH 


594 


STOMACH 


comes blood, but as it is for the 
most part solid, it has to be changed 
much before its goodness can be 
taken out of it by the blood. This 
change, which is called digestion, is 
made in the stomach. The food 
which we take into our mouths is cut 
by the incisors or front teeth, and 
ground up by the molars or back 
teeth, and the finer this is done the 
better. While this is going on it be¬ 
comes mixed with the saliva or 
spittle, which is mostly made up of 
water with a little ALBUMEN and 
soda in it. This moistens the food 
and makes it smooth and slippery so 
that it may be the more easily swal¬ 
lowed. The saliva therefore is of 
great use and should never be 
wasted. 

The tongue and the palate are 
fitted with many little nerves (see 
Brain) by means of which we are 
able to taste food. This taste, which 
we feel chiefly when chewing, may 
easily be spoiled by eating too much 
of rich and harmful food, or by 
chewing such things as gum, india- 
rubber, and tobacco ; so that all who 
wish to enjoy their food should be 
careful what they put into their 
mouths. 

After the food is chewed and soft¬ 
ened it is swallowed, that is, it is 
passed down the gullet into the 
stomach. There is sometimes 
danger in swallowing. In the ar¬ 
ticle Man it is told that there are 
two pipes leading from the mouth 
down into the body, one of which is 
called the windpipe and the other 
the gullet. These pipes open close 
to each other, the windpipe in front 
and the gullet just behind it. The 
windpipe has a kind of lid at its 
mouth, which is usually closed when 
we swallow, so that the food slides 
over it into the gullet. When we 
talk, laugh, or make any other 
sound, this lid has to open to let the 
air pass, and if we do this at the 
same time that we try to swallow, 
some of the food will be sure to slip 
into the windpipe instead of going 


down the gullet. When food does 
this, or goes the wrong way, as it 
is usually called, it makes us cough 
and sputter until it is thrown out ; 
but sometimes, when a hard or 
heavy substance gets into the wind¬ 
pipe, it sticks there and causes great 
pain, and it might cause death. 
Sometimes too, food not chewed 
enough will stick in the gullet and 
cause much trouble, so that a sur¬ 
geon has to be called in to get it 
out. So it is dangerous to talk or 
laugh when swallowing food, and it 
is also dangerous to swallow food 
that is not chewed enough. 

From the gullet the food passes 
into the stomach, where it is di- 



Stomach of Man. 


a. Neck; b. Great pouch; c, Pylorus; 
d, Gullet; e, Small intestine. 

gested. The stomach lies about 
the middle of the abdomen, near 
the liver, and above the intestines 
or bowels. Its shape is some¬ 
thing like the bag of a bagpipe, as 
will be seen in the picture. In this 
d shows the gullet, a the neck of the 
stomach, b the great pouch or prin¬ 
cipal end of the stomach, and c the 
pylorus or opening of the stomach 
into the small intestine, which is 
marked e. In the body the end 
marked b lies on the left side, and 
the intestine e bends over and then 
goes downward. 

Digestion means the turning of 
the food which goes into the stom¬ 
ach into a kind of pulp suited for the 





STOMACH 


595 


STOMACH 


use of the blood. As soon as the 
food enters, blood rushes toward 
the stomach and raises it to the right 
heat needed. When we have eaten 
a full meal we sometimes feel cool, 
because the blood, from which the 
heat of our bodies comes, has gone 
from the outside of the body to the 
parts around the stomach. This is 
generally a good sign, for we know 
then that the stomach is healthy and 
is doing its work ; but if we feel 
flushed and warm after eating, it is 
good proof that something is wrong 
with the stomach. At the same 
time a kind of acid liquid called the 
gastric juice is poured out from the 
lining of the stomach into the food, 
which is also moved to and fro so 
that the gastric juice is mixed up 
with every part of it, until at last it 
is all churned up into a pulp. As 
digestion goes on, the pulp or 
chyme, which is a cream-like fluid, 
passes little by little through the 
pylorus, which means gateway, 
into the small intestine. After the 
stomach is emptied, the gastric juice 
stops flowing, the churning ceases, 
and all becomes quiet until more 
food is swallowed. 

Only enough gastric juice flows to 
dissolve the food needed by the 
body, so that if more food than is 
needed be taken into the stomach, 
some of it will be undigested, and will 
pass in that state into the intestines 
and cause pain. So we should al¬ 
ways be careful not to eat too much. 

The time needed for digestion 
differs according to the kind of food 
eaten, but it is generally from two 
to four hours. About 1822 a man 
named Alexis St. Martin, a boatman 
in the service of the United States, 
was badly wounded by the bursting 
of a gun, which tore away a good 
deal of flesh and a part of his 
stomach. He got well, but the hole 
in his stomach did not heal, and by 
pulling aside a piece of skin one 
could look into it and see its action. 
Dr. Beaumont tried a good many 
experiments with him, and by put¬ 


ting different kinds of food into his 
stomach through the hole, found out 
how long it took to digest each 
kind. The following are some of 
the foods tried and the time needed 
to digest them : beef, 2f to 3 hours ; 
veal, 5 hours ; mutton, 3 to 3f 
"hours ; lamb, 2\ hours ; roasted 
pork, 5^ hours ; bacon, less than 3 
hours ; venison steak, i£ hours; 
tripe, 1 hour ; pig’s feet, 1 hour; 
eggs, 3 to 4 hours ; cheese, 3^ to 4 
hours ; bread, 3^ to 4 hours ; rice, 

1 hour ; sago, if hours ; potatoes, 
2\ to 3^ hours ; beets, 3f hours ; 
and cabbage, 2\ to 4 hours. He 
also found out that uncooked vege¬ 
tables, such as radish and lettuce, 
were much slower in digesting than 
cooked vegetables, like boiled pota¬ 
toes and cabbage. Lobster alone 
by itself was very easily digested, 
but when mixed with lettuce and 
made into a salad it became much 
more indigestible. 

The stomach is covered with a 
network of capillaries or little blood¬ 
vessels, which are all the time suck¬ 
ing up parts of the food as fast as it 
is digested. The rest of the chyme 
passes through the pylorus into the 
small intestine, where it is mixed 
with bile from the liver and another 
kind of juice, and divided into two 
parts. One of these, called the 
chyle, contains all the good parts of 
the food necessary for the support of 
the body, the other is almost all 
waste matter, which passes off 
through the bowels. The chyle is 
taken up by the blood in different 
ways and mixed with it. 

The stomach does its work best 
when the mind is at ease and the 
body is rested. Children often rush 
to the table when heated and excited 
with play, but, though it may not 
seem to hurt them at the time, they 
will be pretty sure to suffer for it 
when they grow older. It is far 
better to give the body time to rest 
and become cool, and the nerves-a 
chance to become quiet before 
eating : the food will not only taste 





STOMACH 


STOVE 


59 6 


better, but it will also digest better. 
Meals too should be always eaten at 
regular hours. Much harm is often 
done to the health by the habit of 
eating irregularly and between 
meals. The stomach needs rest as 
well as the other parts of the body, 
and if it is all the time worried with 
extra food it will soon become worn 
out and refuse to do its work. A 
large part of the ills of the body 
come from the abuse of the stom¬ 
ach. There ought to be about five 
hours between meals, and meals 
should be served at the same hours 
each day. Time too should always 
be taken for eating, for there is no 
worse habit for our health than that 
of swallowing our food in haste. 
The few minutes gained by hurrying 
in this way is sure to be dearly paid 
for by and by. 

It is said above that when food is 
taken into the stomach the blood 
rushes toward it and raises its heat. 
This is because a certain amount of 
heat is needed to rightly digest food. 
On this account we ought to keep 
pretty quiet for a while after eating, 
for violent exercise always causes a 
rush of blood to the surface of 
the body ; and as this draws the 
blood away from the stomach, it 
does not have heat enough to di¬ 
gest the food rightly. It is not 
necessary to remain perfectly still, 
for moderate exercise, which does 
not heat the blood, will harm no 
one ; but such kind of play as run¬ 
ning, leaping, and skipping the 
rope should not be indulged in for 
at least a half hour after eating. 
Brain work too causes the blood 
to rush toward the head, and 
children therefore should not study 
for at least an hour after a hearty 
meal. 

The stomach of most animals is 
like that of man, but that of ruminat¬ 
ing MAMMALS and that of BIRDS are 
different. 

The word stomach is from the Lat¬ 
in stomachus , Greek stomachos , the 
stomach. 


STOVE. The Romans had stoves 
for heating their baths, but they 
were not like those used now. They 
were square boxes made of brick, 
tiles, soapstone, or slate, and some¬ 
times so large that they nearly filled 
one side of the room. This kind of 
stove was used generally in Europe 
until iron stoves began to be made, 
and in some of the northern coun¬ 
tries the broad flat top was made 
the sleeping-place of the family. In 
Sweden and Germany stoves made 
of tiles and plates of porcelain are 
still in use, and some of them are 
made very handsome with paintings 
and ornaments. 

Iron stoves were made in France 
and in Holland early in the last cen¬ 
tury, but none of them were good 
for much. In 1745 Dr. Franklin 
first made his stove, which fora long 
time was the best one in use. It 
was like the open iron fireplaces 
often seen in old houses, but was 
fitted with a kind of sliding iron 
door, by which the front might be 
closed up to make the draught 
stronger. As soon as the fire was 
going well the door could be slid 
back, and the stove made into an 
open fireplace. 

Many kinds of stoves are now 
made in the United States, some of 
cast-iRON and some of sheet-iron, 
some for burning wood and some 
for coal, some for warming rooms 
and some for cooking. Some stoves 
too are made out of soapstone, and 
some are made for burning gas or 
petroleum for fuel, instead of wood 
or coal. A range is a cooking stove 
built into the chimney of a house, 
so that it cannot be moved like a 
common stove. It has holes 
for pots and kettles on top, like 
other stoves, and has ovens either 
at the sides or above the top. A 
furnace is a large stove, built usually 
in the cellar of a building, and fitted 
with a chamber where air is heated, 
and from which it is carried in large 
tin pipes through the walls to heat 
rooms above. In this way a single 





STRAW 


597 


STRAWBERRY 


large fire is made to heat a whole 
house. Many buildings are now 
heated by steam made in a boiler in 
the cellar and carried in small iron 
pipes into rooms, where it fills a coil 
of pipes called a heater, usually set 
against the wall. This warms the 
air of the rooms and gives a very 
pleasant heat. 

The word stove is from the Anglo- 
Saxon si of a, stove. 

STRAW, the stem of wheat, rye, 
and others of the cereal, or grain, 
grasses. Straw has many uses on 
the farm and in the house ; and in 
the arts it is made into paper and 
woven into hats and bonnets. The 
best straw for hats is that of a kind 
of wheat which grows in Italy, where 
it is largely woven into braids and 
sent in that state to foreign coun¬ 
tries. The wheat is cut before it is 
quite ripe, dried in the sun, and 
afterward bleached in the sun and 
dew and by steaming it with sul¬ 
phur. It is then separated into 
different sizes, and woven into long 
braids, like tape, by women and girls, 
ready to be sewn together to make 
straw hats and bonnets. When 
finished the braids are flattened by 
pressure, and then put up in rolls 
for sale. The braids are of many 
different patterns, and of many qual¬ 
ities from very coarse to very fine. 
Some hats, such as Leghorn flats 
for women and children, are brought 
to the United States from Italy 
already sewn together, and are 
pressed out and finished here. 

What are called chip hats are not 
made, as many think, out of straw, 
but out of splints of the Lombardy 
poplar. Logs of this wood are 
buried in the ground for three years 
to dry out the sap, which, if dried 
in the air, will turn red. When 
cured, the logs are split up into fine 
splints, and woven into braids in the 
same way as straw. In Switzerland 
an imitation of chip braid is made by 
machines out of tape. A great many 
straw braids are also made in Swit¬ 
zerland and sent to this country. 


Large quantities of straw braid 
and hats are brought here from 
China. The hats are mostly what 
are called grass hats, being made 
out of a coarse kind of grass. The 
hats called Panama hats are brought 
from South and Central America. 
They are made from the leaves of a 
kind of palm tree. The leaves are 
cut into shreds like straws, bleached, 
and woven into hats around a block 
of wood. Large numbers of Indi¬ 
ans are employed in this work. 

The straw braid brought to this 
country is made into hats and bon¬ 
nets by the straw-sewing machine, 
which will sew a hundred a day. 
The hats are then pressed by another 
machine, which smooths them ready 
for trimming at the rate of four a 
minute. 

The word straw is from the Anglo- 
Saxon streow, meaning litter or 
what is strewn to lie on. 

STRAWBERRY. The strawberry 
PLANT has long runners, with a 
bud at the end which forms roots 
and leaves, and finally a new plant, 
when the stem joining it to the old 
plant decays. The flowers are usu¬ 
ally white, and what is commonly 
called the fruit is only the enlarged 
receptacle, or end of the flower stalk, 
the true fruit being the little seeds 
on the outside of the berry. The 
berries are usually bright red, but 
sometimes white. The wild straw¬ 
berry is found nearly all over the 
United States, and in most other 
mild climates. The cultivated kinds 
were got by planting the seeds of 
the wild strawberry. Northern 
markets are supplied with berries in 
the early part of the season from 
Georgia and South Carolina, then 
from the more northerly Southern 
States, next from New Jersey, and 
lastly from New England. 

The word strawberry is from 
the Anglo-Saxon streawberie , straw¬ 
berry. The plant is so called perhaps 
from its straw-like stems ; but some 
think it should be stray-berry, from 
the straying of its vine. 





STURGEON 


598 


SUGAR 


STURGEON, a large fish with a 
long spindle-shaped body covered 
with a rough skin, and with a flat¬ 
tened head ending in a three-cornered 
snout, covered with bony plates. It 
is found in the seas and rivers of 
Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and 
Northern America. The sturgeon 
of the Caspian and Black seas is 
often ten feet long. Its flesh is much 
eaten, both fresh and salted. The 
roes, washed with vinegar, salted, 
dried, and pressed into cakes or 
packed into casks, is the caviare of 
commerce. That made from the 
roes of the sterlet, a smaller kind of 
sturgeon, is the best. Isinglass is 
made from the air bladders of the 
sturgeon, and leather from the skin. 
There are several kinds of sturgeon 
in the United States, the most com¬ 
mon of which are the sharp-nosed, 
found along the coasts of New Eng¬ 
land and Long Island, and the short¬ 
nosed, which is caught in the Hud¬ 
son river. The flesh of both is much 
esteemed for food. 

The word sturgeon is from the 
Anglo-Saxon styria , Latin stur/o, 
sturgeon. 

SUCKER, a fish of the same fam¬ 
ily with the CARP, of which many 
kinds are found in the rivers and 
lakes of the United States. The 
common sucker of the New England 
and Middle States is from eight 
inches to more than a foot long, 
brownish on the back, reddish-brown 
on the sides, and white below. It 
has no teeth, and its lips are made 
for sucking. This fish is hard to 
catch, because it will seldom suck in 
a bait. There is a large kind, called 
the buffalo sucker, found in the Mis¬ 
sissippi, and other Western rivers, 
which is sometimes more than a yard 
long. 

The sucker is so called because it 
sucks in its food. 

SUGAR. Most of the sugar used 
in the world is made from the juice 
of the sugar cane. It is not known 
where this first grew, but it is sup¬ 
posed in India, as sugar was first 


made there. The cane was carried 
into Spain by the Arabs, and the 
Spaniards took it with them to the 
West Indies, whence it was brought 
to Louisiana about 1751. It is now 
raised in several of the Southern 
States. In very hot countries a 
sugar cane plantation will last some¬ 
times for ten years, but in this coun¬ 
try, where it is cooler, the cane must 
be planted every two or three years. 
It is never raised from the seed, but 
pieces of the cane are cut and plant¬ 
ed, and new canes sprout from each 
joint. 

Sugar cane is a kind of grass, 
which looks much like Indian corn. 
It has a hard and solid stem which 
grows in joints, and which is some¬ 
times three times as high as a 
man, but commonly only once or 
twice as high. The leaves are long, 
ribbon shaped, and pointed, and hang 
over like Indian corn leaves. There 
are many kinds of sugar cane, the 
stalks of which are of different colors, 
some being green, some yellow, 
some purple, and some purple and 
yellow striped. 

As soon as the canes are ripe, 
which is usually in August, they are 
cut and taken to the mill to be 
ground. Every large sugar planta¬ 
tion has its own mill, generally driv¬ 
en by steam, where the canes are 
crushed by passing them between 
large iron rollers, which squeeze out 
all their juice. A little lime is put 
into the juice at once and it is heat¬ 
ed for a short time, because if left to 
itself it would begin to ferment (see 
Beer) or work in less than an hour. 
The lime prevents this and brings to 
the top of the liquid as a scum any 
impurities in it. This is skimmed 
off, and the clear liquid is gradually 
boiled down in large copper pans 
until it is so thick that it will crys¬ 
tallize or turn into sugar crystals 
when it cools. It is then poured into 
great wooden coolers with thick 
sides and about a foot deep, in 
which it cools very slowly. In about 
a day the sugar forms in a soft 





SUGAR 


599 


SUGAR 


mass in the middle, all the rest being 
molasses. The whole is now put 
into hogsheads with holes in their 
bottoms, which are set upon frames 
over a large vat, and into this the 
molasses is allowed to drip for five 
or six weeks, when the sugar is dry- 
enough to be shipped. 

The sugar thus made is the com¬ 
mon brown sugar, sometimes called 
raw or muscovado sugar, from a 
Spanish word meaning unrefined, 
and is usually refined before it is 
used. This is now sometimes done 
at the plantations, but it is generally 
done in the northern United States 
or in England. The sugar is first 
melted in hot water, which is then 
pumped up to the top floor of a high 
building into pans heated with 
steam. Lime is put into the syrup 
and it is let run down to the next 
floor through bags made of cloth, 
which strain it. The syrup, which 
looks like sherry wine as it comes 
out of the bags, now runs into great 
hollow cylinders filled with BONE 
black or animal charcoal, which 
takes out all of the color. It is 
boiled again in vacuum pans—that 
is, covered pans from which the air 
is all pumped out with the air pump. 
This soon takes out all the damp¬ 
ness and the sugar crystallizes again 
and this time perfectly white. When 
drained in moulds, it becomes loaf- 
sugar ; but when the syrup is sep¬ 
arated or driven off by a machine 
which whirls it rapidly around it is 
called granulated sugar. The syrup 
is sold under various names, such 
as sugar-house syrup, golden drips, 
etc., and is used for eating on break¬ 
fast cakes and for cooking purposes. 
The loaf sugar is sometimes sold in 
loaves, and sometimes cut up into 
square lumps, crushed into small 
pieces, or ground to a powder. 

Beet sugar is made in nearly the 
same way as cane sugar. Maple 
sugar is made in the northern United 
States by boiling down the sap of the 
sugar maple. Both of these, when 
refined, are the same as cane sugar, 


but maple sugar is usually eaten in 
the crude state, as most people like 
the taste of it. Beet sugar is not fit 
to eat until refined. 

Sugar is made up of carbon, 
hydrogen, and OXYGEN. There 
are different kinds of sugar, but they 
are all made of the same things, only 
the quantities are not the same. 
Cane sugar, the most important of 
all, has less hydrogen and oxygen in 
it than grape sugar. Grape sugar, 
which is sometimes called dextrose 
or glucose, and sometimes starch 
sugar, is the kind which is in grapes 
and in many other sweet fruits. It 
is easily made out of starch, which is 
composed of just the same materials 
as sugar ; the only difference is, it 
does not contain so much oxygen 
and hydrogen. If now we can add 
enough of these two things to the 
starch to make them equal to the 
amount in sugar, leaving the carbon 
just as it is, the starch will turn into 
sugar. This is done by boiling the 
starch in sulphuric acid and water : 
the acid forces some of the oxygen 
and hydrogen of the water to unite 
with the carbon, and makes sugar, 
or rather a syrup in which sugar is 
mixed with the sulphuric acid. The 
acid must now be taken out. This 
is done by putting some chalk in. 
Chalk is carbonate of lime, which is 
made up of carbonic acid and lime. 
When it is put into the mixture the 
sulphuric acid at once combines with 
the lime and frees the carbonic acid, 
which passes off into the air as a 
gas, and the sulphuric acid and the 
lime make sulphate of lime or gyp¬ 
sum. As this will not dissolve in 
water, the syrup can be easily freed 
from it, and then boiled down until 
most of the water is driven off as 
steam, when the sugar will crystal¬ 
lize. 

Grape sugar can be made out of 
sawdust, or out of cotton or linen 
rags just as easily as out of starch, 
for they are formed of the same 
materials, carbon, oxygen, and hy¬ 
drogen. We have only to alter the 




SULPHUR 


600 


SUMACH 


proportions to change them into 
sugar. 

Grape sugar is not so sweet as 
cane sugar, and is therefore not so 
valuable ; but it is often mixed with 
it, especially in making CANDY. 
It is used in the manufacture of 
ALCOHOL, and in the sweeten¬ 
ing of certain kinds of wine and 
beer. 

The word sugar is from the Hindoo 
shukar , Persian shakur, Arabic suk- 
kur , which are from the Sanscrit 
sarkara , sugar. 

SULPHUR, one of the principal 
non-metallic elements. At com¬ 
mon heat it is a light-yellow, brittle 
solid, without taste or smell. It is 
sometimes found by itself, but 
usually united with some other of 
the elements. Many ores of metals 
are made up of metals united with 
sulphur. Such ores are called sul¬ 
phides ; for example, the ore of lead 
called galena is properly sulphide of 
lead, and the ore of iron called iron 
pyrites is sulphide of iron. Free or 
unmixed sulphur is brought mostly 
from volcanic countries : a large 
part of that used in commerce comes 
from Sicily. It is usually in dirty 
yellow lumps, and has to be puri¬ 
fied. This is done either by melting 
it in pots and drawing off the liquid 
sulphur, or by heating it in close iron 
vessels called retorts, until it boils, 
and collecting the vapor which rises 
from it in a large cool chamber, on 
the sides of which it forms again in 
a yellow powder called flowers of 
sulphur. Sometimes the vapor is 
collected in a liquid form in a small 
hot chamber, drawn off and cast 
into small rolls called roll brimstone. 
Sulphur is much used in the arts, 
especially for making GUNPOWDER 
and matches, for vulcanizing In¬ 
dia-rubber, for bleaching, and for 
making SULPHURIC acid. • 

The word sulphur is Latin. Brim¬ 
stone is from the old English bryn- 
ston, burnstone, which is from the 
Anglo-Saxon brinnan , to burn, and 
staii, stone. 


SULPHURIC ACID is made up of 
SULPHUR, HYDROGEN, and OXY¬ 
GEN. It is a thick, oily, colorless, 
and very biting liquid, and quickly 
chars and destroys most animal and 
vegetable substances. It is com¬ 
monly called oil of vitriol, because it 
was first made from green VITRIOL 
(sulphate of iron) and because it 
pours like oil, but it is now usually 
made by adding more oxygen to 
sulphurous acid. Sulphuric acid is 
one of the most important com¬ 
pounds in the world. It is largely 
used in the making of most of the 
other acids, as well as of SODA, 
PHOSPHORUS, and alum, in bleach¬ 
ing, dyeing, and calico printing, in 
the refining of PETROLEUM, in the 
making of fertilizers or manures 
for enriching land, and in many 
other ways. Sulphuric acid unites 
with metals to form important com¬ 
pounds called sulphates : thus we 
have ALUMINUM sulphate or alum, 
sodium sulphate or Glauber salts, 
magnesium sulphate or Epsom 
salts, CALCIUM sulphate or GYPSUM, 
iron sulphate or green vitriol, copper 
sulphate or blue vitriol, zinc sulphate 
or white vitriol, etc. 

The name sulphuric acid is made 
up of the words SULPHUR and ACID. 

SUMACH, the common name of 
several kinds of shrubs or trees grow¬ 
ing nearly all over the world, and 
which are much used in tanning, 
dyeing, medicine, etc. The common 
sumach of the United States is the 
smooth sumach, a shrub which 
grows ten to twelve feet high, with 
greenish-yellow flowers and sour 
crimson fruit, growing in clusters. 
The leaves are often bright scarlet 
and yellow in the autumn. 

The Venetian Sumach of southern 
Europe is the common smoke tree 
or fringe tree of the gardens. In 
Italy it is used in tanning; the 
leaves are used in dyeing Turkey 
red, and the root also is valuable for 
dyeing. 

Poison Ivy, or poison oak, some¬ 
times called mercury vine, is also a 








SUN 


601 


SUN 


kind of sumach. There are two 
kinds, one of which is a vine, and 
the other a shrub. What is com¬ 
monly called poison sumach or poi¬ 
son dogwood grows usually in 
swamps, and is a shrub ten to fif¬ 
teen feet high. The flowers are 
greenish yellow and the fruit green¬ 
ish white. It has a milky juice, 
which dries like a black varnish. 
The Japanese make their LACQUER 
varnish from a poison sumach very 
much like this. 

The Sumach of Trade is the 

crushed or ground leaves of a small 
kind of sumach grown in Sicily. It 
is valuable for tanning light-colored 
leather and for dyeing cotton cloths 
of a bright yellow. The leaves of 
the smooth sumach and of some 
other kinds are used in this country 
for the same purposes. 

The word sumach is from the 
Arabic summdka, sumach, which is 
from samaka , to be tall. 

SUN. The sun is so bright that 
it dazzles the eyes to look at it, and 
it therefore looks like a mass of light 
with rays darting from it on all 
sides ; but if it be looked at through 
a smoked glass it will be seen to be 
a bright ball. Unlike the moon, it 
never changes its form, but is al¬ 
ways round. This is because its 
light comes from itself. In the ar¬ 
ticle Universe it is told that the 
sun is the centre of a group of bod¬ 
ies called planets, including the earth, 
which are all the time rolling round 
it in great circles called orbits. It 
is also told that all the planets and 
their moons are cool bodies, and 
therefore give out no light and heat, 
but get all their light and heat from 
the sun. Now we know that the 
distance of the sun from us is so 
great (92,000,000 miles) that our 
minds can scarcely think of it. The 
sun therefore must be very large 
and very hot. It does not look 
much larger than the full moon, but 
it is really many million times larger. 
It would take forty-nine of our 
moons to make a globe of the size 


of the earth, and it would take more 
than one and a quarter million 
(1,280,000) globes as large as the 
earth to make one of the size of the 
sun. It looks small to us because 
it is so far away. 

Our mind cannot form any just 
idea of the great heat of the sun any 
more than it can of its distance from 
us. We can only think of it as an 
immense globe of fiercely-burning 
fire, but we know of no heat on earth 
to compare it to. It is so hot that 
nothing on its surface is solid or 
even liquid ; every thing is in the 
shape of a white-hot gas (see Ele¬ 
ment). Most astronomers think 
that it has no solid part, but that it is 
mainly a ball of burning gas, which 
is denser, or more closely packed 
together, in the middle, on account 
of the weight of the gas on the out¬ 
side, but which is kept from turning 
into a liquid by the great heat. 

We cannot see much of the sun 
unless we look at it through a TELE¬ 
SCOPE. We have to be very care¬ 
ful in doing this, and use darkened 
glasses, for its great brightness 
would be very apt to blind us even 
if we used only a small telescope. 
Through a piece of common smoked 
glass the sun looks bright all over 
its surface, but through a telescope 
black spots are often seen on it. 
Some of these spots look like great 
hollows large enough to put several 
earths in ; but though they are hol¬ 
lows, they are really not empty but 
are filled with gases. These gases 
stop the light from below and thus 
make them look like black spots. 
Around their edges great banks of 
burning gas glow like blazing fur¬ 
naces, and both spots and banks of 
flame are all the time changing their 
shapes. But the round sun which 
we commonly see is not all there is 
of it. This is only its denser part, 
and hundreds of thousands of miles 
above it reaches a mass of burning 
gases, making an envelope around 
the sun just as the AIR does around 
the earth. We cannot see this en- 







SWALLOW 


602 


SWAN 


velope any more than we can see the 
stars in the day time, on account of 
the great light of the body of the 
sun ; but when in an eclipse the 
light of the sun is cut off by the 
moon so that it does not dazzle our 
eyes, the burning gases can be seen 
shooting out from the surface of the 
sun hundreds of thousands of miles. 
They appear of many beautiful col¬ 
ors, red being most common, and of 
many shapes which often change. 
By using an instrument called the 
spectroscope (Latin spectrum , the 
image of light passed through a 
prism, and Greek skopein y to view), 
by means of which light is split up 
into the colors of which it is made, 
we can tell what the sun is made of. 
By examining the sun’s light with 
this it has been found that many of 
the ELEMENTS which are on the 
earth are also in the sun, but not in 
the same form, of course, because 
the heat in the sun is so great that 
metals are turned into vapor just as 
water turns into steam here. Among 
the elements found there are hy¬ 
drogen, OXYGEN, SODIUM, BARI¬ 
UM, CALCIUM, MAGNESIUM, ALU¬ 
MINUM, IRON, COBALT, NICKEL, 

zinc, copper, and others. 

Like the planets, the sun is all 
the time spinning like a top. It 
turns round once in about twenty- 
five days and eight hours, moving 
always from east to west. 

The word sun is from the Anglo- 
Saxon sunna , sun. 

SWALLOW. Swallows have large 
wings, a forked tail, and short legs. 
They are very swift flyers and live 
more of the time on the wing than 
any other birds, spending most of 
the day wheeling in circles through 
the air, sometimes soaring very 
high, and uttering shrill screams. 
Their food is chiefly insects, which 
they catch in the air while flying, 
their mouth being very large and 
wide, and they even drink on the 
wing, scooping the water up from the 
surface of ponds and streams. They 
build their nests of mud, mixed with 


straws, hairs, and soft threads, 
which they plaster on to some build¬ 
ing, usually under the eaves. They 
lay five or six eggs, and raise two 
broods each season. 

The Barn Swallow is the best 
known swallow in the United States. 
It spends its winter in the Southern 
States, coming north in May and 
going southward again at the end 
of August. It is much like the 
chimney swallow of Great Britain in 
its habits, building its nest usually 
against the rafters of barns and 
sheds or inside of old chimneys. 

The Chimney Swallow of the 
United States is properly a swift and 
not a swallow. It also comes from 
the south in the spring and returns 
thither about the first of September. 
It builds its nest in hollow trees or 
unused chimneys of dry twigs which 
it breaks off from trees as it flies 
and glues together with a sticky li¬ 
quid from its own mouth. Chimney 
swallows or swifts live in flocks. It 
is amusing to see a large flock of 
them going down an old chimney 
where their nests are : they wheel 
round and round in circles and each 
time they pass over the chimney the 
lower ones drop in until all are safely 
in. They make a loud whirring noise 
in passing in and out of a chimney. 

A kind of swift or swallow in 
China makes the edible birds’ nests 
so much valued by the Chinese for 
food. The nests are a glue-like sub¬ 
stance which the birds get from their 
own mouths and which they mix 
usually with grass and hairs. It 
melts easily in water, and makes 
excellent soups and gravies. 

The swallow belongs to the order 
znsessores, or perching BIRDS. 

The word swallow is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon swalewe, swallow. 

SWAN. The swan is one of the 
largest and most beautiful of water 
birds, and has been admired in all 
times for the elegance of its form 
and the grace of its movements. It 
is found in almost all parts of the 
world, living when wild on lakes, 




SWAN 


603 


SWEET POTATO 


rivers, and sea-coasts, especially of 
cool countries. Swans, when full 
grown, are usually pure white and 
have a red bill; but the young, 
which are called cygnets, are bluish- 
gray with a lead-colored bill. They 
are clean birds and take great care 
of their feathers. Their food is 
chiefly the roots and seeds of water 
plants, but they also eat worms, 
young frogs, and small fish. They 
build their nests of grass and reeds, 
near the water, and lay six to eight 
greenish-white eggs and sit about 
six weeks. The male bird guards 
the nest while the female is sitting, 
and savagely fights any thing which 
comes near it. 

Swans show great courage also in 
defending their young, and one has 
been known to drive off even an eagle 
which had attacked her brood. They 
fight usually with their wings, with 
which they can strike very heavy 
blows. A female swan who was on 
the bank of a river with her brood 
of young once saw a fox swimming 
across toward her. She did not wait 
for the enemy to come on shore, but 
took to the water and swam out to 
meet him, and attacked him with 
her wings with such fury that the 
fox was drowned. 

The Black Swan, found in Aus¬ 
tralia, is much like the white swan 
in form, but is all black excepting a 
few small feathers which are white, 
and has a red bill. These birds live 
when wild in flocks of eight or ten. 
Many have been tamed and they are 
now to be seen in public parks. 

The Tame Swans kept in parks and 
public gardens are descended from 
the wild swan, but differ from them 
a little. The young are always 
white instead of bluish-gray. The 
finest tame swans are those called 
Polish swans, which are brought 
chiefly from Germany, where many 
are raised. They are now to be 
seen in almost all our public parks 
which have ponds in them. Great 
numbers are kept on the river 
Thames, in England, many of which 


belong to the queen, and others to 
companies in London which keep 
them. The cygnets are caught and 
marked every year with the mark 
of the company to which they be¬ 
long. 

In old times in England the flesh 
of the swan was served on the tables 
of nobles, but this was more on ac¬ 
count of the scarcity of the bird than 
because its flesh was good. It is 
sometimes eaten now, but its meat 
is dry and has little flavor. 

The ancients called the swan the 
bird of gods and goddesses, and its 
beauty was described by many 
poets. Its voice was called sweet 
and musical, though to our ears it 
is a harsh trumpet-like cry, and it 
was said that in dying it always 
sang a mournful song. From this 
ancient story, which is not true, 
have been made many poems and 
songs. 

The swan belongs to the order 
natatores, or swimming BIRDS, and 
to the duck family. 

The word swan is Anglo-Saxon. 

SWEET FLAG, a kind of reed 
which grows in swamps and ponds, 
and along the banks of rivers. It is 
found in the cooler parts of North 
America and Europe, and in some 
parts of Asia. Its roots, which have 
a strong smell and a biting taste, 
are used by confectioners in making 
some kinds of candy, by perfumers 
in making toilet vinegar, and some¬ 
times by physicians. It is also 
chewed sometimes. The leaves 
have a sweet smell when bruised, 
and in old times were used like 
rushes to strew on the floors of 
houses and churches. 

The name sweet flag is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon swet, sweet, and 
the Danish flag, a marsh plant. 

SWEET POTATO. When Colum¬ 
bus went back to Spain after his dis¬ 
covery of the New World he carried 
with him, among his presents for 
Queen Isabella, some sweet pota¬ 
toes. Some think that these were 
the first sweet potatoes ever seen 





SWEET POTATO 


604 


SWORD FISH 


out of America, but others think 
that this vegetable was grown in 
China and in India long before this 
country was known. Wherever it 
first grew, it became well known in 
Europe before the white potato, 
and not long after Columbus took it 
to Spain its tubers or roots were car¬ 
ried to England and sold there as a 
great delicacy ; and it is the sweet 
potato which Shakespeare and other 
early English writers mean when 
they speak of potatoes. 

The sweet potato is a creeping 
vine, with leaves commonly heart- 
shaped, and large purple flowers 
with white on the edges, much like 
the morning glory in form. The 
roots, which grow something like 
those of the white potato, differ 
much in size, some being nearly 
round and some long and pointed ; 
and also in color, some being yel¬ 
low, some red, and some nearly 
purple. The sweet potato is largely 
cultivated in hot countries, and gives 
food to a great many people. It is 
common in all the southern United 
States, and is grown as far north as 
New Jersey and Ohio. 

Sweet potatoes are sometimes 
grown in the South by planting 
pieces of the roots, but in the North 
from slips or cuttings. In places 
where there is no frost, the vine 
takes root at the joints and grows all 
the year round without replanting ; 
but in cold places the potatoes are 
planted in warm beds until they 
sprout, and when the sprouts root 
they are broken off and planted. 
Sweet potatoes raised in the North 
are more mealy than those grown 
in the South, because they have 
more STARCH in them ; those from 
the South are damper and sweeter 


because they have more sugar in 
them. 

The sweet potato was first called 
potato by the early English writ¬ 
ers ; the word potato is from the 
Spanish batata, which is probably 
from some Indian word, and which 
was first given to the sweet potato 
and afterward to the white potato. 

SWORD FISH, the common name 
of a large fish, related to the mack¬ 
erel, so called because its upper jaw 
is lengthened out into a long weapon 
like a sword, which it uses to stab 
its prey with. The sword fish is 
usually ten to twenty feet long, 
bluish-black on the back, and white 
below, and the sword is about one- 
third the length of its body. It feeds 
on fish, chiefly mackerel, and may 
often be seen following their shoals 
along the coast of New England. 
It is caught with the HARPOON, 
and its flesh is eaten, although it is 
rather coarse. 

The sword fish can go through 
the water very fast, and as it is some¬ 
times quite heavy, its blade is thrust 
into its enemies with great strength. 
It often fights the whale, which is 
too clumsy to ward off its attacks, 
and kills it by stabbing it from be¬ 
low. Sometimes it runs its sword 
through the bottom of a ship, mis¬ 
taking it perhaps for a whale. A 
ship sailing along quietly has all at 
once felt a shock as if a rock had 
been touched, and after getting into 
port the broken blade of one of these 
fish has been found sticking in its 
side. Persons bathing too have 
sometimes been stabbed by sword 
fish. 

The name sword fish is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon swurd , sword, 
and fisc, fish. 





T 


TAMARIND, the fruit of a large 
tree which grows wild in various 
parts of Africa and Asia, but which 
is now cultivated in the West Indies 
and in South America. The fruit is 
a pod, five or six inches long and 
as thick as a man’s finger, contain¬ 
ing a row of seeds, which are sur¬ 
rounded by a sour juicy pulp. When 
the pods are ripe they are picked 
and the fruit shelled out, packed into 
casks, and covered with boiling 
syrup. The West India tamarinds 
are preserved in this way, but those 
from the East Indies are put up 
without syrup. In warm countries 
a cooling acid drink is made from 
tamarinds. It makes a pleasant 
drink for those sick with fevers. 
The wood of the tree is used for cab¬ 
inet work, but is so hard that it is 
wrought with difficulty. 

The word tamarind means Indian 
date, being made up of the Arabic 
words tamar , a dried date, and 
hindt, Indian. 

TAMBOURINE, a musical instru¬ 
ment of the drum kind, made of a 
thin hoop of wood or metal, covered 
with tightly - stretched parchment, 
and hung with little bells. It is held 
in one hand and played by striking 
it with the knuckles of the other, and 
sometimes with the elbow. The 
tambourine is a very ancient instru¬ 
ment, and has always been much 
liked by peasant and gypsy dancers. 
It is sometimes used in orchestras, 
and always in negro minstrel troupes. 

The word tambourine is from the 
French tambourin , from tambour, 
a drum. 


TANAGER. The tanagers, of 
which there are many kinds, are 
found only in America, and chiefly 
in the warm parts. One of the most 
beautiful of them, the scarlet tana- 
ger, comes from Mexico in April, is 
found in New York State about the 
middle of May, and afterward in New 
England and Canada. The male is 
bright scarlet, with wings and tail 
glossy black, and the female yellow¬ 
ish green. It is a shy bird and lives 
mostly in woods, seldom coming near 
houses. It does not sing much, but 
has a lively chirp, something like 
“ chip, churr.” Its nest is built in 
trees and bushes, and it lays four 
or five greenish-blue eggs, specked 
with purple and brown. The 
scarlet tanager does not like cold 
weather, and goes southward early 
in September, flying usually by 
night. It is a very beautiful pet, 
but hard to tame. 

The Summer Red Bird, another 
tanager, is found mostly in the South¬ 
ern States, but is sometimes seen in 
the Middle States and southern New 
England in warm weather. The 
male is light red, with dusky-brown 
on the back and on the ends of the 
wing and tail feathers, and the 
females are olive above and reddish 
yellow below. It lays four or five 
light blue eggs. 

The tanager belongs to the order 
insessores, or perching BIRDS, and 
to the finch family, in which are also 
the larks and sparrows. 

The word tanager is probably from 
tangara , the Brazilian name of these 
birds. 


605 



TAPIOCA 


606 


TEA 


TAPIOCA, a starch-like substance 
obtained from the roots of the man- 
dioc or cassava plant, which grows 
in South and Central America and 
the West Indies. The plant is a 
shrub nearly as high as a man, with 
roots which when ripe are large as a 
Swedish turnip or long beet. The 
root is grated and thoroughly washed 
in water, which takes out a poison in 
the sap, and afterward dried by heat 
and made into grains. Tapioca is 
an important food in South America. 
In the United States it is much used 
in soups and for making puddings 
and blanc mange. 

TAR, a black, impure kind of 
TURPENTINE, made by burning the 
wood of pine and fir trees. Much 
tar is made in the United States, 
especially in North Carolina and 
Georgia, from the same kind of pine 
trees from which turpentine is got. 
Trees which are too old to yield 
turpentine and dead trees are usually 
picked out for making tar. A shal¬ 
low hole is dug in the top of a bank, 
and the bottom and sides rammed 
down hard. A large cast-lRON 
pan is put into the bottom of the 
hole, having a spout which sticks 
out through the side of the bank. 
The hole is then filled full of pieces 
of pine wood, packed closely so as 
to fill the whole space, and covered 
over with turf and earth, a place 
being left to set fire to the heap. 
As the wood burns slowly, the tar 
melts out of the wood, runs down 
into the iron pan and thence off 
through the spout into barrels, which 
are bunged and sent off as fast as 
filled. Tar is soft when warm and 
runs like molasses, but becomes 
thick and hard in cold weather. Its 
black color comes mostly from the 
smoke in burning. After all the tar 
has run out of the burned wood 
nothing but charcoal is left. Wood 
tar is much used for tarring the 
ropes of ships to preserve them from 
the water, and also for covering 
wood. Tarpaulins are sheets of 
coarse canvas painted with tar, used 


for covering goods to keep them 
dry. When tar is boiled in an open 
iron pot until most of the watery 
matter passes off in steam, it be¬ 
comes a solid and shiny substance 
called pitch, which is brittle when 
cold, but becomes soft when heated. 
Pitch is much used in ship building, 
for covering the bottoms of vessels, 
caulking seams, etc. For coal tar 
see Gas. 

The word tar is from the Anglo- 
Saxon teor , tar. 

TEA, the dried leaves of a plant 
which grows chiefly in China, Japan, 
and India. There are many kinds of 
tea, but they are all supposed to 
come from one kind of plant, the 
difference being made by the differ¬ 
ent soils and climates in which the 
plants grow, by the time of picking 
the leaves, and by the various ways 
in which the leaves are cured. The 
tea plant is an evergreen shrub which 
when wild grows four or five times 
as high as a man (25 to 30 feet), 
but which when cultivated is kept 
pruned so that it is usually a little 
less than a man’s height. It is 
raised from the seed, and the plants 
begin to yield when three years old ; 
they give the most leaves when eight 
or ten years old, and after that give 
less and less, and new plants are 
set out in their place. 

In China tea plants are usually 
cultivated in small plantations, and 
the leaves are picked by the family. 
The first picking takes place in April, 
and is made up of buds and very 
young leaves. The shrubs soon put 
out more leaves, and a second pick¬ 
ing is made in May. This is usually 
the most important crop. A third 
crop is picked about the middle of 
June, and a fourth in August. The 
leaves of the last picking are large 
and coarse, and make the poorest 
tea. In the picking season Chinese 
family groups may be seen on all the 
hillsides gathering the leaves. Each 
picker has a small bamboo basket 
slung by a cord around the neck, so 
as to leave both hands free. The 





TEA 


607 


TELEGRAPH 


leaves are gathered very fast, and 
the baskets when filled are emptied 
into larger ones, which are carried 
to the curing places. 

Teas are of two kinds, green and 
black teas, which are made from 
the same leaves, but are cured differ¬ 
ently. When the leaves are dried 
quickly they make green tea, but 
when they are allowed to dry slowly, 
so that they ferment or work a little, 
they turn black and make black tea. 
The leaves are first slightly dried in 
shallow baskets in the sun, and are 
then put, a few at a time, in an iron 
or copper pan, heated usually over 
a charcoal fire, and stirred until they 
are dry enough, when they are 
emptied upon a table, where other 
workmen roll them with their hands 
into the little rolls in which we see 
them. They are afterward dried 
again, sorted, and made ready for 
packing. Black teas are often col¬ 
ored green with Prussian blue, TUR¬ 
MERIC, and other things. The 
Chinese do not dye the teas they use 
themselves, but only those they send 
to foreign countries. Teas are pack¬ 
ed in chests lined with thin sheet 
LEAD, and with a thin, silky, straw- 
colored paper made from the bark 
of the paper MULBERRY. When the 
tea is poured into the boxes, a man 
gets in and stamps it down with his 
feet until the chest is filled tight, 
when the lead is soldered over it and 
the wooden cover nailed on. 

In China and Japan tea is the com¬ 
mon drink of the people, and there 
are public houses where it is sold in 
all the towns and along all the roads. 
It is always drunk clear, and never 
with milk and sugar, as we drink it. 
Rich Chinese make their tea in the 
cup, by putting in some of the leaves 
and pouring boiling water over them, 
but the poorer classes use a teapot. 
In Japan the leaves are sometimes 
ground to powder, so that they may 
be drunk with the tea. The Rus¬ 
sians use lemon juice instead of milk 
and sugar. 

Most of the tea used in the world ' 


comes from China, but a good deal 
is sent from Japan and India, and 
some from Java. 

The word tea is from the Chinese 
cha or tha , tea. 

TELEGRAPH, an instrument to 
send messages to a distance by 
means of electricity ; usually called 
the electric telegraph, or the electro¬ 
magnetic telegraph, because it is 
worked by an electro-magnet. To 
understand how the telegraph works 
the articles Electricity and Mag¬ 
net should be read before this one. 
There are several kinds of tele¬ 
graphs, but the Morse telegraph is 
the one most used. This telegraph 
is made up of three separate parts : 
a Voltaic battery to get the electricity 
from ; insulated wires, by which the 
electric current is carried to any dis¬ 
tance ; and a register, or instrument 
which makes a record of the signs 
which are used instead of the letters 
of the alphabet. The Voltaic bat¬ 
tery is told about under Electric¬ 
ity. In telegraphing. Grove’s Vol¬ 
taic battery is mostly used. To send 
a message a long distance a stronger 
battery is needed than for a short 
distance. A battery can be made 
stronger by adding more cups or 
cells to it. 

To telegraph from one place to 
another it is necessary to have a wire 
stretched between the two places for 
the electric current to flow over. 
Iron wire is generally used, because 
it is stronger and cheaper than cop¬ 
per. In some countries the wire is 
covered with gutta percha, so that 
the electricity cannot get away from 
it (gutta percha being a non-conduc¬ 
tor), and buried in the ground ; but 
in the United States wires are usually 
stretched upon high poles. As the 
electricity would get away and run 
down the poles to the earth if the 
wire should touch them, the wire is 
fastened to glass knobs, glass being 
also a non-conductor. The electric¬ 
ity, being thus kept to the wire, will 
flow freely between the places where 
the wire is stretched. But to make 




TELEGRAPH 


608 


TELEGRAPH 


the current flow something else is 
needed. If you will look at the pic¬ 
ture of the Voltaic battery on page 
213, you will see that it is necessary 
to have two wires, one from each 
end of the battery, and that the two 
ends of these wires must be brought 
together before the electric current 
can flow round and round. It is 
just the same in the telegraph. Sup¬ 
pose that we wish to build a tele- 


; B 




Fig. 1.—Plan of Electric Telegraph. 


graph from New York to Washing¬ 
ton, as shown in the picture Fig. 1, 
where A is the Voltaic battery in 
New York. From the copper plate 
in the right hand cup we stretch the 
wire B C to Washington, D being the 
register, or instrument at Washing¬ 
ton which makes the signals or little 
marks on the strip of paper. To 
make the electric current flow round 
and round, as in the picture of the 
Voltaic battery on page 213, we 
ought to have another wire stretched 
back from D to A and joined to the 
zinc plate in the left hand cup of the 
battery. This would complete the 
circuit, as it is called, and the cur¬ 
rent could then keep on flowing 
round and round. When the tele¬ 
graph was first made it was thought 
necessary to have such a second 
wire, but it was soon found out that 
if the two ends of the wire were 
put down into the earth, the earth 
itself would carry the current back 
just as well as or even better than a 
second wire would. So, instead of 
putting up a second wire, which 
would add much to the cost of the 
telegraph, the ends of the wires at 
New York and Washington are now 


carried down into moist ground and 
fastened to large metal plates, as 
shown at E and F. The current 
will then flow from the battery in 
New York along the wire B C to 
Washington, thence down through 
the plate E into the earth, thence 
through the earth to F, and up to 
the battery at A, thus making the 
electric circuit complete. 

This circuit must flow freely all 
the time, else we cannot 
telegraph, for it is by stop¬ 
ping it quickly and then 
letting it flow again that 
we are enabled to make 
the signals. When the 
flow of electricity round a 
circuit is stopped, the cir¬ 
cuit is said to be broken, 
and when 'it is allowed to 
go on again it is said to 
be closed. The circuit is 
broken and closed by means of a 
little instrument called a key, shown 
in the picture, Fig. 2. The key is 
made a part of the electric circuit 
by the wires M and R, so that the 
current flowing from New York to 
Washington comes to it through 
the wire M, passes through the 
bar N into the bar P, and thence 
out through the wire R. The cur- 



Fig. 2.—Telegraph Key. 

rent will flow through only when 
the knob on the end of N is pressed 
down so that it touches P. As 
shown in the picture N does not 
touch P, and the circuit is therefore 
broken, but a slight pressure of the 
finger will bring it down so as to 
close the circuit. When the pres¬ 
sure is taken off from N it will 
spring up again and the circuit will 














TELEGRAPH 


TELEGRAPH 


609 


be again broken. Thus by pressing 
on the key and letting it spring up 
again, the circuit may be closed and 
broken at pleasure. 

Now to understand exactly how 
the dots and lines of the telegraph 
are made by closing and breaking 
the circuit, we must study the pic¬ 
ture, Fig. 3, which shows the regis¬ 
ter at the Washington end of the 
line, marked D in Fig. 1. In this 
m m are two electro - magnets, or 
pieces of soft iron wound round with 
a great length of fine copper wire, the 
two ends of which are seen at R and 
W under the table. These ends are 


so connected with the wire B C (Fig. 
1) that when the electric current 
passes from New York to Washing¬ 
ton it enters the register by the wire 
R (Fig. 3), passes through the cop¬ 
per wires around the magnets m in, 
then out through the wire W, and 
thence through the earth back again 
to New York. While the electric 
current is passing through the coils 
of wire around the electro-magnets 
they are magnetic and will attract 
iron like any other magnet; but as 
soon as the circuit is broken they 
lose their power and become only 
soft iron again. Above the electro- 



Fig. 3.—Telegraph Register. 


magnets is a metal bar /, which is 
so fastened at d that it can move up 
and down a little. When the circuit 
is closed so that electricity is flowing 
through the coils of the magnets, 
the end a of the lever is drawn down 
and the end s is pushed up. The 
end s has a steel point on it which 
is thus pressed against the roller un¬ 
der which the strip of paper passes. 
The paper, pp , is drawn slowly un¬ 
der this roller by means of clock¬ 
work, c. 

Now, when the telegraph operator 
in New York presses on the key 


(Fig. 2), so as to close the circuit, 
the magnets m m (Fig. 3) at the 
Washington end of the line become 
magnetic, the end a of the lever is 
attracted and drawn down by the 
magnets, the other end s is pushed 
up, and the steel point presses 
against the paper and dents a line in 
it. This line will be made as long 
as the key is kept pressed down in 
the office in New York ; but as soon 
as the operator takes his finger from 
the key, the circuit will be broken, 
the magnets in the register at Wash¬ 
ington will lose their power on the 
























TELEPHONE 


610 


TELEPHONE 


lever, the end s will drop down, and 
a blank space will be left on the 
paper. If the operator in New 
York taps on the key so as to close 
the circuit only for an instant, a dot 
will be made on the paper in Wash¬ 
ington. Thus, by pressing on the 
key a short time, a little longer time, 
or not at all, the operator can make 
dots, lines, or blank spaces on the 
paper in Washington ; and by put¬ 
ting together lines and dots in differ¬ 
ent ways all the letters of the alpha¬ 
bet may be made, so that any kind 
of a message may be sent. 

The alphabet of the Morse tele¬ 
graph, shown in the following, is 
made up wholly of dots and lines, 
the letters most used being the sim¬ 
plest : 



The word telegraph means far 
writer, being made up of the two 
Greek words tele, afar, and graph- 
ein , to write. 

TELEPHONE. In the article Mag¬ 
net (page 376) is told how currents 
of electricity are made to flow 
through a wire wound round a steel 
magnet by bringing a piece of soft 
iron near the end of the magnet and 
drawing it away again. In the mag¬ 
net told about there the wire is wound 
round it, and the two ends are then 
joined together. But suppose that 
instead of one there are two mag¬ 
nets, marked a and b in the picture, 
which are separated from each other. 
Let the wire be first wound round 
the magnet a, then carried to a dis¬ 
tance and wound round the second 
magnet b , and finally brought back 
and joined to the part around the 
first magnet. The electric circuit 
will thus be complete, so that a cur¬ 


rent excited in the coil round the 
first magnet will flow round the 
second magnet and back to the first. 
If the wires were connected with a 
Voltaic battery (see Electricity) 
the current would flow all the time ; 
but if we make the current by put¬ 
ting a piece of soft iron near to the 
end of the magnet, it will flow only 
when we bring the iron near to and 
draw it away from the magnet, thus 
breaking up the flow into many lit¬ 
tle currents. If we use, to excite 
the electric current, a sheet of soft 
iron, so thin that it can easily be 
made to vibrate, or tremble, the cur¬ 
rent will flow through the wires much 
like waves, which will be large or 
small just as the vibrations or trem¬ 
blings of the iron plate are large or 
small. 

You will remember (see Magnet) 
that as a magnet will make electric 



Fig. 1.—Magnets joined by Wire. 

currents, so electricity will make 
changes in a magnet. When the 
magnet a has its magnetism changed 
or excited by the soft iron plate c, a 
current of electricity is caused to 
flow over the wire and around the 
magnet b ; this current will make a 
change in the magnetism of the mag¬ 
net b like that caused in a by its iron 
plate, and the magnet b will act on 
its plate d and cause it to vibrate or 
quiver in the same way as the plate 
c was made to vibrate or quiver in 
front of the magnet a. 

Now, if you can understand this 
you can understand how the tele¬ 
phone works. Next is a picture of 
a real telephone, with a wire 
stretched from New York to Phila¬ 
delphia. The instruments at each 
end are made alike. In the New 
York telephone A is the magnet, M 












TELEPHONE 


611 


TELEPHONE 


the helix or coil of copper wire 
wound round a kind of spool at one 
end of the magnet, and C the thin 
plate of soft iron. You will note that 
the end of the magnet comes pretty 
close to the plate. In the Philadel¬ 
phia instrument B is the magnet, H 
the helix, and D the iron plate. The 
wire between the two cities is shown 
in W W ; but instead of being car¬ 
ried back again as in Fig. i, its two 
ends are carried down and fastened 
to the plates G and G, which are 
buried in the ground. The circuit 
is thus made complete through the 
earth, as is told about in Tele¬ 
graph, and the electric current will 
flow round and round just the same 
as if the wires were stretched all 
round as in Fig. i. 


Each instrument has a mouth¬ 
piece, or kind of funnel, to talk into. 
The one in New York is shown at 
S, and the one in Philadelphia at T. 
These funnels are round (those in 
the picture are cut through, so as to 
show only a section) and have a 
small round hole in them, opening 
on to the middle of the thin iron 
plates, C and D. The outside of one 
is shown in Fig. 3. In the article 
Sound is told how waves of sound 
cause any thing to vibrate or quiver 
when they strike against it. Thus, 
when a sound is made in the mouth¬ 
piece S, the waves of sound cause 
the iron plate C to vibrate. These 
vibrations, which make the plate 
move backward and forward in 
front of the end of the magnet A. 



Fig. 2.—Plan of Telephone. 


cause quivers or tremors (Latin 
tremor, a trembling) in the magnet, 
and these make electrical currents 
in the coils of wire of the helix M ; 
these electrical currents pass over 



Fig. 3.—Mouthpiece of Telephone. 


the wire W W to the helix H in the 
telephone in Philadelphia, and cause 
the same kind of tremors in the mag¬ 
net B, which carries them to the iron 
plate D, and it is thus made to vi¬ 


brate in just the same way in which 
the plate C was made to vibrate by 
the waves of sound. These vibra¬ 
tions in the plate D will then strike 
the air near it and cause like vibra¬ 
tions in it, making waves of sound 
which will reach the ear of the per¬ 
son using the telephone in Philadel¬ 
phia, and make just the same sound 
as was made in the New York in¬ 
strument. Thus persons can talk 
backward and forward between two 
distant places with nearly as much 
ease as if they were in rooms next to 
each other. When the operator in 
New York wishes to speak to the 
operator in Philadelphia, he first 
makes a signal to him, and the one 
in Philadelphia puts his telephone 


















TELEPHONE 


612 


TELESCOPE 


to his ear to listen. The one in New 
York then puts his telephone to his 
mouth and talks loudly and clearly 
into the mouthpiece. His words set 
the iron plate vibrating and the vi¬ 
brations are carried through the 
magnets and over the wires, as told 
above, to the iron plate in Philadel¬ 
phia, which makes the same kind of 
sound waves in the ear of the opera¬ 
tor there, and he thus hears every 
word or sound made at the other 
end of the line in New York. If now 
the Philadelphia operator wishes to 
answer the one in New York, he 
puts his telephone to his mouth and 
talks through it in just the same 
way that the New York man did 
through his, while the New York 
man puts his to his ear to listen. So 
the same telephone can be used to 
talk through and to listen with ; but 
it is better for each operator to have 
two instruments, one of which he 
keeps up to his ear all the time, and 
the other he uses for speaking, thus 
saving the trouble of changing them. 

The telephone is now used chiefly 
in cities, where merchants and other 
people doing business with each 
other find it very convenient to talk 
between their stores and offices. 
There are three different kinds in 
use, the Bell telephone, the Gray 
telephone, and the Edison telephone, 
each named after the man who 
first made it. In the Bell telephone, 
which is much used in New York, the 
mouthpiece, like the one in the pic¬ 
ture (Fig. 3), commonly called the 
“ phone,” is put to the ear only, the 
instrument to talk through, which is 
called the transmitter, being made 
like a little box, and fastened to the 
wall. The person using this tele¬ 
phone stands in front of the trans¬ 
mitter, with the phone to his ear, 
and talks in his common voice, but 
speaking plainly. A conversation 
can thus be easily carried on at 
almost any distance. 

All kinds of sounds can be sent 
over telegraph wires by means of 
the telephone. Thus, the voices of 


people singing and the music of a 
piano or of any other instrument can 
be heard hundreds of miles away. 
A concert given in Philadelphia has 
been plainly heard in New York, 
and a man whistling in Paris has 
been heard in London. 

The word telephone means far- 
talker, being made up of the two 
Greek words tele , afar, and pho- 
nein, to speak. 

TELESCOPE, an instrument to 
aid us in seeing things at a distance. 
When we try to look at any thing 
afar off the image which the rays of 
light from it make in the eye is 
too small to be clearly seen. Much 
of the light from it too is lost in its 
passage through the air, so that fewer 
rays reach the eye. But by the aid 
of a telescope we are enabled to 
collect the rays and to make an en¬ 
larged image of the object so that 
we can see it much better. 

There are two kinds of telescopes : 
the astronomical, used by astrono¬ 
mers to view the planets and stars, 
and the terrestrial, commonly called 
a spy-glass, used for looking at dis¬ 
tant things on the earth. The as¬ 
tronomical telescope is made up 
chiefly of a LENS, or round glass, 
called an object glass, which forms 
an image of the distant object, and 
of an eye glass which magnifies or 
enlarges this image. The lenses are 
fitted into a long tube, which keeps 
out rays of light from other things 
when the eye is looking through it. 
In the picture, where only the lenses 
are shown without the tube, A B 
shows the object glass, and C D the 
eye glass. The arrow marked M N 
is a distant object, from which the 
rays of light I K and L K fall on the 
object glass and form on the other 
side of it the image n in. The image 
thus brought near is looked at by 
the eye through the lens C D, which 
magnifies it so that it can be seen 
clearly. 

As will be seen in the picture, this 
image is upside down, but this is 
of no consequence in viewing the 





TELESCOPE 


613 


TELESCOPE 


heavenly bodies, which are round. 
In looking at distant things on the 
earth, how’ever, it would be very in¬ 
convenient to see them upside down ; 
so two other lenses are put into 
spy-glasses, and the rays of light 
from the image made by the object 
glass are passed through these and 
the image is thus turned upright. In 
the second picture C D and E F are 


these two glasses. The rays from 
the image n m pass through these 
glasses and form a new image m' n ', 
which is magnified by the eye glass 
G H in the same way as in the other 
telescope. The tubes into which the 
glasses of terrestrial telescopes are 
put are usually made to shut up. 
The kind of telescopes shown in the 
first two pictures are called refract- 


M 

A 

i 



Lenses of Astronomical Telescope. 


ing telescopes, because the image of 
the object is formed by refraction 
through an object glass. (See 
Light.) 

Another kind of telescope used 
for looking at the heavenly bodies is 
called a reflecting telescope, because 
the form of the distant object is re¬ 
flected in a mirror, and the image 
thus made is looked at through a 

A 


magnifying glass. The tube of such 
a telescope is made very large, and 
is open at the end which is pointed 
at the object to be looked at. In 
the third picture, which shows the 
great telescope used by the astrono¬ 
mer Herschel, A A is the tube, with 
the mouth open toward the object 
looked at, M N. The other end of 
the tube is closed by the mirror, 



B B, whose face is concave, that is, 
hollowed out, so that the image 
which M N makes in it is reflected 
to C C. At E is a small tube, fitted 
into the mouth of the large one, and 
having in it an eye-glass, which mag¬ 
nifies this reflected image, so that it 
looks very large and clear to the eye. 
The one who looks into this tele¬ 
scope has his back toward the object 


looked at. Some reflecting tele¬ 
scopes are made differently, but the 
principle is the same in all. 

The largest telescope of this kind 
in the world is that made by Lord 
Rosse at a cost of $60,000. Its tube 
is wide enough for a man to walk 
in (six feet), and it is more than nine 
times as long as a man (fifty-five 
feet). Herschel’s great telescope is 




















THERMOMETER 


614 


THERMOMETER 


about two thirds as large as this. 
It is not used now, but its great 
tube is still kept as a curiosity, set 
up on three stone pillars at Sir John 
Herschel’s place, in England. When 
it was taken down from its stand, 
in 1839, all the family sat in it and 
sang a farewell song. 

The largest refracting telescope 
in the world will be the one now 
making for Yale College, which 
when finished will be twenty-eight 
inches wide. The one in the Naval 
Observatory at Washington is 
twenty-six inches wide. 



The word telescope means far- 
viewer, being made up of the two 
Greek words tele , afar, and skopein , 
to view’ or see. 

THERMOMETER, an instrument 
for measuring heat. In the article 
Heat it is told that all things, 
whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, 
are made larger by adding to their 
heat; and that when heat is taken 
away from them they grow smaller 
again. It takes a great deal of heat 
to make a solid change much in size, 
and gases grow much larger with a 
very little heat; so liquids, which act 
between the two, are found to be the 
best for thermometers. Thermome¬ 
ters are usually made of a glass 
tube filled with MERCURY. If the 
glass and the mercury, one of which 
is a solid and the other a liquid, grew 
in size alike in the same amount of 
heat the mercury would never rise 
in the glass tube. But with the 
same heat mercury swells seven 
times as much as glass does ; there¬ 
fore, when it is warmed it rises up 
in the tube to find room for itself, 
and when cooled it sinks down again. 


In making a thermometer a small 
glass tube, with an even hole through 
it, is picked out. If the hole be not 
of the same width all the way 
through, the mercury will not rise 
evenly in it, so great care has to 
be taken to get a good one. Only 
about one in every six of those made 
is found to be even. The bulb, or 
little round ball at the lower end is 
then made by melting the end of the 
tube and blowing it (see Glass). 
The next thing is to put the mer¬ 
cury into the bulb, but as this can¬ 
not be done while it is full of air, 
the bulb is heated so as 
M to swell the air and 

_drive some of it out. 

~ The open end of the 

_ tube is then put into a 

dish of mercury, and as 
the air cools again it 
N shrinks and some of the 
mercury rises up and 
partly fills its place. 
The mercury in the bulb is then 
boiled, which makes it swell up 
so as to drive out the rest of the 
air; and as the open end is still 
kept in the mercury, when the 
bulb cools the mercury in the tube 
shrinks and more mercury runs up 
and fills the tube full. The bulb is 
then put into some liquid heated a 
little hotter than the highest heat 
which the thermometer is meant to 
show. This makes the mercury 
swell and run out of the top of the 
tube, and when it stops running 
over, the glass is melted with a 
blowpipe flame and the end sealed 
up. As the mercury cools it sinks 
down little by little in the tube, 
leaving a vacuum or empty space 
above it. 

In order to tell just how much 
heat it takes to make the mercury 
swell and rise up to any point in 
the tube, a scale of figures has to 
be fastened to it, on which the freez¬ 
ing point and the boiling point of 
water are marked. The freezing 
point is the heat at which ice begins 
to melt, and the boiling point is the 
















THERMOMETER 


615 


THIMBLE 


heat at which water boils. To find 
the freezing point, the bulb and tube 
are surrounded with melting ice, and 
the place in the tube where the mer¬ 
cury stops is marked. The boiling 
point is then found by putting the 
bulb and tube into the steam of boil¬ 
ing water, and marking the place at 
which the mercury stops. The space 
between these two points, and the 
part below the freezing point, are 
then divided up and marked with 
figures. 

There are several kinds of ther¬ 
mometers, in which the scale of fig¬ 
ures is made differently. In the 
common thermometer, called Fah¬ 
renheit’s because it was first brought 
into use by a man of that name in 
Holland about 1720, the freezing 
point is marked 32 and the boiling 
point 212. What is called zero is 
marked o on the scale, and is there¬ 
fore 32 degrees below the freez¬ 
ing point. The Fahrenheit ther¬ 
mometer is the one most commonly 
used in England and the United 
States, but in most countries in Eu¬ 
rope the centigrade thermometer is 
generally used. In this the freez¬ 
ing point is marked o, and the boil¬ 
ing point 100. Thus there are just 
100 steps between the two points, and 
it is from this that it gets its name of 
centigrade (Latin centum , hundred, 
and gradus, step). Still another 
thermometer, called Reaumur’s, be¬ 
cause first made by a Frenchman of 
that name, in 1730, has the freezing 
point marked the same as in the cen¬ 
tigrade, but the boiling point is 
marked 80. This thermometer is 
used in Spain and in some parts of 
Germany. 

As mercury freezes at about 39 
degrees below the zero point of Fah¬ 
renheit’s thermometer, alcohol col¬ 
ored red is used in thermometers for 
very cold places. More than 100 
degrees below zero can be measured 
in an alcohol thermometer. Very 
great heat is measured by an instru¬ 
ment called a pyrometer, in which 
the heat is marked by the swelling 


of heated bars of iron and other 
metals which move a pointer on a 
kind of clock face. 

The word thermometer means 
heat-measure, being made up of 
two Greek words, ther me, heat, and 
metron, measure. Pyrometer is 
made from the Greek pur, fire, and 
metron, measure. 

THIMBLE. A silver thimble is a 
very small thing, but it takes more 
than twenty men, besides a good deal 
of costly machinery, to make one. In 
the first place the silver, which 
comes to the factory in bars, is 
passed through great steel rollers 
which roll it into sheets so thin that 
it would take twenty of them to 
make an inch high. The sheets are 
cut into strips about two inches 
wide, that look like silver ribbons, 
and out of them another machine 
punches round pieces about as large 
as a silver half-dollar. These round 
pieces, or blanks, as they are called, 
are next fed one by one to a ma¬ 
chine which turns up the edge all 
round to make the rim, and are then 
put into a press where a steel die 
comes down with a smash and gives 
the thimble its proper form all at 
once. It is now of the right shape, 
but is smooth and has no dents in its 
top. To make these the thimble is 
put into a lathe, and while it is 
whirling round, a workman, who 
sits in front of the lathe with a tool 
shaped some like a hammer, puts a 
dent in the middle of the top, then a 
ring of dents round it, then another 
ring, and so on until all the dents 
are in. The thimble is then polished, 
has a number marked on it, and has 
the border of leaves or figures 
usually seen on thimbles, engraved 
or stamped around its base. 

Gold thimbles are made of steel, 
and have only a thin coating of gold 
on them. They are made in much 
the same way, as are also brass and 
steel thimbles ; but brass and steel 
thimbles are sometimes made with¬ 
out any tops. Thimbles are also 
made out of hard india-rubber, and 




THRUSH 


616 


TIGER 


sometimes even out of ivory and 
china. Thimbles have been in use 
only about two hundred years. It is 
not known who first made them, 
though some think they came from 
Holland. 

The word thimble is changed from 
the old English thumb-bell. The 
Germans call the thimble finger - 
hut , finger-hat. 

THRUSH. Thrushes are found in 
all parts of the world, and among 
them are some of the best of the 
singing birds. They live on insects, 
worms, and berries, make their 
nests usually on trees or bushes, 
and lay five or six eggs. 

The Brown Thrush, or thrasher as 
it is commonly called, is one of the 
most common American kinds. It 
is handsomer than the mocking bird, 
being bright reddish-brown above 
and yellowish-white below, marked 
with dark-brown spots shaped like 
an arrow head, and having black 
legs. Its habits are much like those 
of the mocking bird, and it ranks 
next to it as a singer. In the spring, 
when the female bird begins to rear 
her young, the sweet warble of her 
mate is heard above the voices of 
all other singers in the northern for¬ 
est. It can be tamed as easily as 
the mocking bird, and soon becomes 
cheerful and familiar, flying to its 
master when let out of the cage, 
perching on his shoulder or finger, 
and even following him around ; but 
it is jealous of rivals and will drive 
other birds away. It is very bold 
and will fight any thing which comes 
near its nest. It usually lays pale 
buff eggs, marked with small 
brown spots. When kept in a cage 
it may be treated like the mocking 
BIRD. 

The Wood Thrush is also a sweet 
singer, but it has not so many notes 
as the brown thrasher. Its plum¬ 
age is reddish-brown above and 
white spotted with black on the 
breast. Its eggs are light blue. 

The thrush belongs to the order 
insessores , or perching birds, and 


to the same family with the Amer¬ 
ican robin, mocking bird, cat bird, 
and European blackbird. 

The word thrush is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon thrysce , thrush. 

THYME, a small plant of the mint 
family, which grows wild in South¬ 
ern Europe, but is much cultivated 
here in gardens for its fragrant 
leaves. It is used for flavoring soup, 
stuffing, and other cookery. Oil of 
thyme, which is distilled (see Alco¬ 
hol) from it, is used in liniments. 

The word thyme is from the 
Greek thumos, which is from 
thuein , to burn incense, and the 
plant is so called because it was 
used for incense. 

TIGER. The tiger is found only 
in Asia. It is usually about eight 
feet long and three or four feet high, 
but some much larger ones have 
been seen. It is more graceful in 
form and more active and stealthy 
in its movements than the lion, has 
a smaller head, and no mane. Its 
color is a bright tawny yellow above 
and white beneath, striped with 
brown bands and bars. Its tail, 
which is very long, is ringed with 
black. The tiger sleeps by day in 
some shady spot amongst the jungle 
or brushwood and seeks its prey by 
night. It often lies in wait near 
springs for animals which come to 
drink. It can run very fast, can leap 
more than three times the length of 
a man (15 to 20 feet) at a bound, 
and is able to carry off an ox. 

Tigers are the terror of villages in 
India, from which they carry off’ 
many cattle and human beings. 
When hungry they will get food, no 
matter what danger stands in the 
way, but they never kill for the mere 
pleasure of killing. A tiger has been 
known to carry off a soldier from the 
middle of a camp, and even to seize 
a man in broad daylight from among 
a crowd of men. Once at the fair 
of Hurdwar, in India, where a great 
many were gathered together, a tiger 
sprang out of a thicket near by and 
carried off a man in the sight of all 




TIGER 


617 


TIN 


the people. Formerly tigers carried 
off hundreds of people every year in 
India, but they are not so plentiful 
now in the thickly settled parts as 
they used to be. 

Tiger hunting is a favorite sport in 
the East. The hunters ride in a kind 
of carriage or house on the backs of 
elephants and shoot the tigers with 
rifles. There is much danger in this, 
for a tiger will sometimes spring upon 
the elephant and hurt some of the 
hunters. Many tigers are caught in 
traps baited with a live goat or sheep, 
and sometimes heavy beams are so 
placed that they will fall and crush 
them when they walk along a path. 
Bows which shoot poisoned arrows 
are sometimes so fixed in their path 
that they will go off when touched. 
In China a large box-trap with a 
looking glass is set with the door 
open. The tiger, seeing his own 
image in the glass, and thinking it 
to be another tiger, goes in, and the 
door closes and he is caught. This 
kind of trap is very old, it being 
shown in ancient sculptures. In 
some parts of India tigers are killed 
in a still more curious way. Many 
broad leaves smeared with a kind of 
glue like birdlime are strewn in the 
tiger’s way. When he steps on any 
of them they stick to his paws ; he 
rubs his paws on his head to get 
them off, and the leaves stick to his 
face ; the harder he works to get 
them off the worse he gets stuck up, 
until he gets blinded and rolls on the 
ground howling with rage. The 
hunters hear the noise and come and 
shoot him. 

The tiger can be tamed, and will 
sometimes show much love for its 
master and for those who take care 
of it. Almost every one has seen 
the so-called lion tamers, Van Am- 
burgh and others, go into the tigers’ 
den in menageries and play with the 
animals as if they were common cats. 
A tiger which was being brought on 
a ship from India to Europe became 
so tame that it was allowed to wan¬ 
der about in all parts of the vessel, 


and the cabin boys used to sleep with 
their heads on it for a pillow. 

The historian Pliny says that the 
first tiger taken to Rome was a tame 
one which belonged to the Emperor 
Augustus. When Heliogabalus be¬ 
came emperor, he rode into Rome in 
a chariot drawn by four tigers and 
four panthers, all of which were so 
tame that they used to run all about 
his palace. The cruel Emperor Nero 
had a tame tigress that he kept near 
him. Sometimes, at the end of a 
feast, he would point out to the ani¬ 
mal some one at whom he was angry, 
and in a moment the bleeding body 
of his enemy would lie at his feet. 

The tiger is a mammal of the or¬ 
der carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the cat family, to which 
belong also the lion, leopard, 
PANTHER, COUGUAR, JAGUAR, 
LYNX, and common CAT. 

The word tiger is from the Latin 
and Greek tigris, tiger. 

TIN, a METAL, and one of the 
principal ELEMENTS. When pure, 
it is almost as white as silver, is soft¬ 
er than gold and harder than lead, 
and may be hammered into thin 
plates and drawn out into wire. The 
tin of trade is never quite pure, but 
has in it a little iron, lead, or ARSE¬ 
NIC. Its principal ore, called tin¬ 
stone (tin oxide), is made up of tin 
and oxygen. It is heated in fur¬ 
naces with charcoal; the CARBON of 
the charcoal unites with the oxygen, 
and makes carbonic oxide gas, which 
goes off into the air, and the tin 
melts and is drawn off and cooled in 
iron moulds. Tin thus made is 
called block tin. The principal 
places in the world from which tin 
ore is got are Cornwall in England, 
Banca in the Dutch East Indies, 
Malacca, and Australia. Some is 
found also in Peru, in Mexico, and in 
several parts of the United States, 
especially in Missouri and California. 
Tin is used in the arts for making 
tin foil, for covering other metals, 
and for making alloys. It is used to 
cover other metals on account of its 




TOAD 


618 


TOBACCO 


brightness and because it does not 
rust at the common heat of the air. 
Copper and brass are often coated 
with it, as in PINS, kettles and other 
vessels for cooking, bath tubs, etc., 
but its chief use is in tinning thin 
iron plates for tin ware. The iron is 
rolled out into thin sheets, thoroughly 
cleaned with weak acid, and then 
dipped into melted tin and allowed to 
stand in it for an hour or more, when 
the tin unites with the iron making a 
thin coating over the whole surface. 
Bridle bits, stirrups, tacks and small 
nails are tinned in the same way. 
Saucepans and other hollow vessels 
are tinned by pouring melted tin into 
them and turning them round and 
round until the tin has touched every 
part of the inside. 

The alloys of tin are important. 
Those formed with copper are told 
about under bronze. Among those 
formed with lead are Britannia metal, 
queen’s metal, PEWTER, and SOL¬ 
DER. 

The word tin is Anglo-Saxon. 

TOAD. Toads differ from frogs 
in several ways. Frogs have teeth in 
the upper jaw, but toads have none 
at all. Toads’ legs are shorter than 
those of frogs and they therefore 
cannot leap so far ; and as they have 
no webs between their toes, they can¬ 
not swim so well. They live mostly 
on land, going into the water only in 
the spring to lay their eggs. Their 
tadpoles grow up in the water just 
as those of frogs do. The body of 
the toad is covered with a thick warty 
skin, from which a kind of white juice, 
having a bad smell, oozes out. 
Though this is not poisonous, it is 
apt to make a tender skin smart, and 
a dog will drop a toad from his 
mouth very quickly. The skin comes 
off every year in two pieces, which 
are swallowed by the animal. Toads 
lie numb during the winter in holes 
in walls or under logs and stones. In 
warm weather they usually hide away 
during the day in shady places, and 
come out at evening in search of 
food. They are very useful in gar¬ 


dens in destroying grubs and in¬ 
sects ; in the market gardens around 
London they are bought for this 
purpose, and they are often put into 
hot-houses to rid them of ants. 

The toad belongs to the class am¬ 
phibia, or animals which live both 
in water and on the land. 

The word toad is from the Anglo- 
Saxon tadie , toad. 

TOBACCO, the dried leaves of an 
annual plant, belongingto a group 
of plants called nicotiana , after Jean 
Nicot, a Frenchman who sent the 
seeds from Portugal to France in 
1560. When the Spaniards landed 
in Santo Domingo in 1492 they 
found the Indians smoking the leaves 
of this plant, which they grew for 
this use. The plant was soon car¬ 
ried to Europe and thence to Asia, 
and is now cultivated in warm and 
mild climates all over the world. 

The tobacco plant grows some¬ 
times as tall as a man, though it is 
usually but little more than half as 
high. It has large broad pointed 
leaves, covered with fine hairs, and 
bears a cluster of purplish pink 
flowers on a stalk. But only tobac¬ 
co meant for seed is allowed to blos¬ 
som, the flower bud being always 
broken off in that to be dried. 
When fully grown the plant is cut 
off just above the ground and hung 
up to dry, head downward, in build¬ 
ings open at the sides so that the 
air can pass through. After about 
three months the leaves are stripped 
from the stems, separated into three 
or four different kinds, and packed in 
boxes or casks for sale. When the 
tobacco reaches the manufacturer the 
first thing done is to pull out the 
stems which run through the middle 
of the leaves. The stems are not 
good for much, but are used in mak¬ 
ing cheap snuff and poor kinds of 
cut tobacco. The leaves are made 
into cigars, chewing and smoking 
tobacco, and snuff. In making 
chewing and smoking tobacco the 
leaves are sweetened, colored, and 
flavored with molasses, liquorice, 





TOMATO 


619 TORTOISE SHELL 


salt, socla, saltpetre, aniseed, etc. 
Cut tobacco is cut into shreds in 
machines which work some like a 
hay-cutter. Snuff is made by grind¬ 
ing the leaves to a fine powder. For 
some kinds of snuff the leaves are 
dried in kilns, and for others they are 
ground when moist. Snuffs are col¬ 
ored and flavored with various things. 

The word tobacco is from tabaco, 
the name given by the Indians of 
Santo Domingo to the pipe in which 
they smoked it. 

TOMATO, the fruit of an annual 
plant of the nightshade family, 
which first grew in the warm parts 
of America, but is now cultivated in 
all parts of the world where the cli¬ 
mate is suitable. In old times they 
were, grown in gardens chiefly as 
curiosities, and were called love- 
apples. There are several kinds, 
which differ in size, shape, and color, 
but the large red ones are most culti¬ 
vated for market. Tomatoes are 
eaten either raw as a salad, or cooked 
in various ways. They are also 
pickled and preserved, and made into 
catsup. Great quantities of them 
are put up in tin cans every year for 
winter use. The earliest tomatoes 
in our markets are brought from the 
Bermuda Islands. 

The word tomato is from tomatl , 
the American Indian name of the 
plant. 

TOPAZ, a PRECIOUS STONE, 
made up of alumina (see Alumi¬ 
num), silica (see Silicon), and 
other things. It is usually colorless 
like glass, but is sometimes yellow, 
red, blue, or green. The white or 
colorless topaz is often cut like the 
diamond, and looks much like it, but 
is easily scratched by the diamond. 
This and the rose-red kind are the 
most valuable, but no topazes sell 
very high. The best are brought 
from Brazil. The topaz is next to 
the sapphire in hardness. What is 
called the oriental topaz is not a real 
topaz, but a sapphire. It is of a 
beautiful deep orange-yellow color, 
and is very valuable. 


The topaz is named from the island 
of Topazos, in the Arabian Gulf, 
where the Romans got topazes. 
TORTOISE. See Turtle. 

TORTOISE SHELL, the covering 
or shell of a kind of sea turtle, 
found mostly in the Indian ocean. 
This turtle is sometimes called the 
hawk-bill turtle, because its jaws are 
hooked like those of a hawk ; and 
sometimes the imbricated (Latin 
imbricatus, tiled, from imbrex , a 
tile) turtle, because its shell is formed 
of a series of plates like tiles, lapped 
one over the other as tiles are on a 
roof. These plates are the tortoise¬ 
shell of commerce. The finest ones, 
marked with the beautiful reddish 
brown and golden yellow shades, are 
those on the back ; the belly plates 
are plain yellow. 

Tortoise-shell may easily be soft¬ 
ened by putting it into boiling water, 
and may then be moulded or pressed 
into any shape, which it will keep 
after cooling. Pieces may also be 
welded or joined together by scraping 
the edges down thin, warming them, 
and then pressing them tightly to¬ 
gether in a screw press. When tor¬ 
toise-shell is to be inlaid with mother- 
of-pearl, gold, silver, etc., the pieces 
to be inlaid are put in their proper 
places on the shell, which has been 
softened by warming, and the whole 
is then screwed up in a press until 
the pieces are forced into the shell. 

Tortoise shell is much used for 
inlaying and veneering cabinets and 
other furniture, for making boxes, 
card-cases, combs, many kinds of 
ornaments, the rims of eye-glasses, 
etc. In making eye-glass rims only 
a narrow slip of shell is used for each 
rim. A slit is sawn in it with a fine 
saw, the shell is softened, and the 
slit is pulled open little by little until 
it is made into a round hole-large 
enough for the glass. A groove is 
then cut around the inside of it by 
means of a little circular SAW, and 
the glass is slipped in while the shell 
is soft. It is lastly finished by filing 
and polishing. Even the filings and 






TOW 


620 


TOYS 


chippings of tortoise shell are made 
use of by being softened and pressed 
into moulds. 

Tortoise shell is so called becdtose 
it was once thought to be the shell 
of the tortoise. 

TOW, the coarse and broken part 
of flax and hemp, combed out by 
the hackle or hatched. Tow is not 
so strong as the long threads of flax, 
and is used for cheap goods, such 
as sacking and common twine. 
It can be spun on machines nearly 
like those for cotton, which are 
easier to work than flax-machines. 
Tow is also much used for caulking 
or filling up the seams of ships to 
keep them from leaking, and for 
oiling and cleaning machinery. 

The word tow is from the Anglo- 
Saxon taw or tow, tow. 

TOYS. Until within the past 
few years almost all the toys used 
by children in this country were 
brought from Europe, and a great 
many kinds are still brought from 
there, but most of those which can 
be made by machinery or which 
need much skill in their manufacture 
are made in the United States. Tin, 
iron, and pewter toys, and all toys 
which go by clock-work and are 
wound up with a key are made in 
this country, chiefly in Connecticut, 
New York, and Pennsylvania. 
Great numbers of these metal toys 
are made every year, and new kinds 
are all the time being found out. 
They are sold very cheap, because 
most of their parts can be stamped 
out by machines, and all that has 
then to be done to them is to put 
the pieces together and paint them. 
For a long time this kind of toy was 
made in Germany and England, 
but now they cannot make them as 
good or as cheap as we do. 

Toy musical instruments, such as 
tin trumpets, jewsharps, zithers, 
metalophones, and drums, were 
once mostly made in Germany and 
France, but are now chiefly made in 
the United States, very few being 
brought from Europe. Almost all 


the drums used by American boys 
are made in Massachusetts. Musi¬ 
cal boxes all come from Switzer¬ 
land, and some harmonicas and 
jewsharps from Austria. 

Almost all wooden toys come from 
Germany, where they are made 
wholly by hand, mostly by peasants 
in the mountains of Bavaria, Sax¬ 
ony, and the Tyrol. These people 
are very poor and do not know any 
thing about what we call the com¬ 
forts of life. They seldom get meat 
to eat, but live mostly on milk and 
vegetable food. During the sum¬ 
mers they work out of doors, but in 
winter, when the snows lie deep in 
their country, they employ their 
spare time in making toys. All the 
members of the family, men, women, 
and children, work at this business, 
carving poplar and plane tree wood 
by hand with knives and other small 
tools. There are made the Noah’s 
arks, animals of all kinds, carved 
figures of men and women, jumping 
jacks, wooden houses and furniture, 
villages, and all other hand-made 
wooden toys. As these people live 
so poorly and have few wants, they 
can make these toys much cheaper 
than they could be made in this 
country. The best carved toys 
come from the Tyrol, but some 
good ones come also from Switzer¬ 
land. 

Almost all dolls, with the excep¬ 
tion of a few fine wax and porcelain 
ones, which are made in France, are 
brought from Germany. Wooden 
jointed dolls are made mostly in the 
Tyrol, wooden dolls in Saxony, and 
wax dolls in Bavaria. Masks, or 
false faces, are made mostly in Ger¬ 
many of papier mache, in much 
the same way as dolls’ heads, by 
moulding sheets of soft paper pulp 
either into moulds or over faces 
made of plaster of Paris. They are 
then dried and painted. Almost all 
papier mache toys, such as cats 
which mew, dogs which bark, and 
other animals, come from Germany, 
and they are made, like the wooden 







TRIANGLE 


621 


TROUT 


toys, mostly by poor people in their 
own houses. 

Nearly all the marbles too come 
from Germany, the agates from Sax¬ 
ony and the cheaper kinds from Ba¬ 
varia. Indeed, Germany is the great 
toy shop of the world, for more toys 
are made there than in any other 
country ; but it is probable that be¬ 
fore many years most of those used 
by children in the United States, 
with the exception of carved wood 
toys, will be made in our own coun¬ 
try. 

The word toy is a short form for 
play-toy, meaning things or tools 
for play. Toy is from the Danish 
to/, tools or materials. 

TRIANGLE, a musical instrument 
made of a rod of steel, bent into the 
shape of a triangle, and played by 
being struck with a small steel bar. 
It is used in ORCHESTRAS and mili¬ 
tary bands. 

TROMBONE, a wind musical in¬ 
strument of the trumpet kind, 
made usually of brass, and blown by 
the mouth. It is made up of a long 
tube in two parts, one of which 
slides in and out of the other, and 
it has a broad bell-shaped end and a 
mouth-piece much like those of a 
trumpet. There are three kinds of 
trombones in use in military bands 
and orchestras, called the alto, the 
tenor, and the base trombones, 
which play different parts of the 
music. The tone of the trombone 
is grander and more powerful than 
that of the trumpet. 

Trombone is an Italian word, 
made from tromba , a trumpet, and 
means great trumpet. 

TROUT, the common name of a 
fresh-water fish of the salmon family, 
which includes also the SMELT and 
others. The common brook or 
speckled trout is caught in the 
streams of Canada, New England, 
and the Middle and Western States. 
It is eight to twenty inches long, 
and seldom weighs more than one 
and a half pounds. It is brownish 
above, with dark markings, yellow 


ish-brown on the sides, and yellow¬ 
ish-white below, and its sides are 
covered with yellow spots, often 
dotted with vermilion. It is consid¬ 
ered a great delicacy for the table, 
and anglers take much delight in 
catching it. 

Trout are caught with the rod and 
line, and may be fished for in several 
ways, and with several kinds of 
bait. In fly-fishing the bait is a com¬ 
mon fly, grasshopper, cricket, or 
some other live insect, or a fly made 
by hand. The rod should be ten or 
twelve feet long, and should have a 
reel with about fifty yards of fine 
silk, grass, or hair line wound on it. 
The line in use should be about half 
as long again as the rod. The 
fisherman must learn to throw this 
so that the fly will fall lightly on the 
water, the fly first and the line after¬ 
ward. When a fish is hooked, care 
must be taken not to put a sudden 
strain on the line. If the fish jump 
out of water, drop the end of the 
pole so as to let the line loose, for if 
it should be tight when he comes 
down he will tear himself loose ; 
but at all other times the line should 
be kept tight. If he runs away 
give him plenty of line by unwind¬ 
ing it, but keep it tight all the while, 
and when he stops wind in little by 
little until he is tired out, when he 
may be landed. Never try to lift a 
trout out by the line, but use a little 
landing net, which should be put 
under him. It is always best to fish 
down stream, when possible. 

Trout may also be caught with a 
minnow, shiner, or shrimp. A 
stouter rod should be used than in 
fly-fishing, and the bait should be 
kept moving all the time. In fishing 
with angle-worms the line may be 
either cast out and drawn gently in, 
or, if the worm be lively, it may be 
held still. If the worm be dropped 
in carefully under banks or near 
rocks, fine trout may often be taken. 
The fisherman should be careful not 
to let his shadow fall on the water 
and should try to keep hidden, as 




TRUMPET 


622 


TUNNEL 


trout have keen eyes and are very 
shy, and will dart away if they see 
anyone. They are also frightened at 
any noise, and even talking will 
drive them away. 

The word trout is from the Anglo- 
Saxon truht , trout. 

TRUMPET, a wind musical in¬ 
strument, made usually of brass, 
and blown by the mouth. As now 
made, it is a tube about eight feet 
long, but twisted round once so as 
to make it only about three feet 
long. The end blown in has a 
mouthpiece, and the end from which 
the sound comes is bell-shaped. It 
has several keys by which different 
notes are made. Trumpets are 
used in military bands and orches¬ 
tras. 

The Speaking Trumpet is a straight 
tube with a bell-shaped end, and a 
broad mouth-piece into which the 
person using it speaks. It keeps 
the SOUND waves together and thus 
makes the voice much louder. 

The Ear T rum pet is a kind of horn 
used by deaf persons. It has a 
small end to put to the ear, and a 
large end to speak into. The sound 
waves are thus kept from scattering 
and are all carried to the ear. 

The word trumpet comes from the 
French trompette. The Italian 
name is tromba. 

TUNNEL, a passage made under 
ground or water for a road, canal, 
or sewer. It is usually very much 
more costly to make a tunnel under¬ 
ground than to make a passage way 
which is open to the air above ; but 
if the ground through which the pas¬ 
sage to be cut is very high, it may 
be cheaper to tunnel than to make 
an open roadway. This is the rea¬ 
son why tunnels are cut through 
high hills and mountains. In mak¬ 
ing a tunnel through a hill an open 
cut is usually made on each side 
through the slope of the hill until it 
gets to be fifty or sixty feet deep, 
and then the workmen begin to tun¬ 
nel. They do this from both sides 
at once, the work being calculated 


so nicely that the two parts will meet 
in the middle of the hill ; and some¬ 
times, when a tunnel is to be very 
long, pits called shafts are sunk 
down from the top of the hill to the 
line of the tunnel and then workmen 
dig each way toward those who 
are tunnelling from the outside. 

Tunnels in rock are now usually 
blasted out with nitro-GLYCERiNE 
instead of with gunpowder, which 
was formerly used. Holes are 
bored in the rock by means of 
DRILLS worked by machinery, and 
little tin tubes filled with nitro-gly- 
cerine are put into them and joined 
by copper wires with an electrical 
battery (see ELECTRICITY), a spark 
from which fires them all at once. 
The same machine which drills the 
holes in the rock blows air into the 
tunnel and clears away the smoke 
after each blast. At first only a 
small rough way, called a heading, 
is made, and this is afterward cut 
smooth and made of the right size. 

When a tunnel is cut through 
hard solid rock it is made like an 
arch overhead, and it does not need 
any props or lining to hold up its 
roof; but if the rock is soft and 
full of seams, it has to be propped 
up with timber as the work goes on 
until walls and arches of stone are 
built, when the props are taken out. 
Tunnels in earth do not need drill¬ 
ing or blasting, as the earth, whether 
hard or soft, is easily taken out with 
the pickaxe and shovel, but the 
roof has to be carefully propped up 
all the time and then walled and 
arched with stone or brick. Tun¬ 
nels under rivers and other water 
are made in the same way as those 
under ground, but the greatest care 
has to be taken that the water does 
not break through. 

The longest railroad tunnel in the 
world is that called the Saint Gothard 
tunnel, which goes through the Alps 
from Italy into Switzerland. It is 
nine and a half miles long. The 
next longest one is the Mont Cenis 
tunnel, which goes from Italy to 




TURKEY 


623 


TURKEY 


France, and is nearly eight miles 
long. The longest railroad tunnel 
in the United States is the Hoosac 
tunnel, under Hoosac Mountain, in 
Massachusetts, which is more than 
four and a half miles long. The 
tunnel under Lake Michigan at Chi¬ 
cago, built to get good drinking 
water from the lake, is about two 
miles long, and a like one at Cleve¬ 
land, under Lake Erie, is a mile and 
a quarter long. There are several 
tunnels under the river Thames in 
London ; and there is talk of making 
one under the English Channel, from 
England to France, which would be 
thirty-one miles long. 

The word tunnel is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon twine , a large cask, old 
tunnels having been made mostly of 
that shape. 

TURKEY. The turkey was first 
found in America, but it is now 
raised in almost all parts of the 
world. The wild turkey was once 
plentiful in the United States east of 
the Rocky Mountains and in Mex¬ 
ico, but it is now much more scarce 
than it used to be. It is a hand¬ 
somer bird than the tame turkey, its 
feathers being generally brown 
mixed with blue and green, and 
having a shine like copper or bronze. 
The head and neck are bare of 
feathers, the skin being bluish black 
with dark red lumps on it. The 
male bird is larger and finer looking 
than the female. 

Wild turkeys live in flocks in the 
woods, where they feed on acorns, 
nuts, berries, buds, and insects. 
They also like wheat, corn, and 
other grains, and often do great 
damage to fields. Their wings are 
strong and they can take long 
flights, but as they can run very fast 
they seldom fly unless forced to do 
so. At night, however, they fly up 
and roost on the tops of the highest 
trees. When the female turkey 
gets ready to lay her eggs she steals 
away to some quiet spot, because 
the male turkey will break them if 
he finds them. She makes her nest 


in a hollow in the ground, lining it 
with soft grass, moss, and leaves, 
and lays ten or fifteen yellowish- 
white eggs, specked with brown. 
When she leaves her nest to get 
food, she carefully covers it over 
with reeds and grass to hide it 
from the eyes of the fox, lynx, and 
crow, all of whom like turkey eggs. 
After the young are hatched, the 
mother leads them away into quiet 
and hidden places, and cares for 
them for several months, until they 
are old enough to go alone. 

Hunters usually shoot turkeys on 
their roosts by night, especially on 
slightly misty moonlight nights, 
when these birds are not so much 
on their guard as in clear weather. 
Many are also caught in traps by 
day. A turkey trap is a pen made of 
fence rails and covered over at the 
top, and has a trench leading under 
one side of it. Corn or some other 
grain is scattered along the trench 
and a quantity is put inside the pen, 
and the turkeys, walking along with 
their heads down to pick it up, soon 
find themselves inside. The foolish 
birds could walk out easily enough 
in the same way they came in if they 
would only put their heads down 
again, but as there is no corn to 
show them the way, they stretch 
their heads up high and run round 
looking for a hole to get out of. The 
Indians catch many of them and 
use their feathers for making orna¬ 
mental work. 

The Tame Turkey is descended 
from the wild turkey. Though its 
feathers are duller than those of the 
wild turkey, it is generally much 
larger. Its flesh is liked by most 
people better than that of any other 
domestic fowls, but the flesh of the 
wild turkey is sweeter and more 
juicy than that of the tame turkey. 
The turkey is the principal meat of 
our Thanksgiving and Christmas 
dinners. Turkeys were first carried 
to England in the early part of the 
sixteenth century. The first tur¬ 
keys raised in Franee were eaten at 




TURMERIC 


624 


TURTLE and TORTOISE 


the wedding of Charles IX. in 
1570. 

The turkey belongs to the order 
rasores, or scratching BIRDS, and to 
the pheasant family. 

The turkey is so called because 
it was once believed that it first 
came from Turkey. 

TURMERIC, the roots of an East 
Indian plant, belonging to the same 
family with ginger. The roots are 
orange-yellow inside, smell some 
like ginger, and have a spicy taste. 
The East Indians use it to season 
curry, and it is also used to give a 
yellow color to varnishes, and to 
color ointments. Though its color 
is not very lasting it is much used 
in dyeing silks and woollens. The 
turmeric sold in the stores is usually 
in the form of a yellow powder, made 
by grinding the roots. 

The word turmeric is said by 
some to be from the new Latin 
terra merita , valuable earth. 

TURNIP, a garden or field plant, 
cultivated for its bulbous root, which 
is used for food. It grew first in 
Asia and in Europe, and was 
brought to this country from Eu¬ 
rope. There are several kinds of 
turnips, belonging to two different 
varieties : common turnips, with the 
bulb usually broader than long, and 
Swedish turnips or ruta-bagas (Swe¬ 
dish rota-baggar , root rams), of 
which the bulbs are longer, larger, 
and more solid. In Great Britain 
the turnip crop is very important, as 
farmers depend on it for winter food 
for cattle and sheep ; but in this 
country, where Indian corn abounds, 
turnips are not much raised except¬ 
ing for table use. They are not 
worth much for food, as they are 
more than nine tenths water. 

The word turnip is in old English 
turnep, and is from the Welsh turn , 
round, and the Anglo-Saxon nape , 
turnip. 

TURPENTINE, the sap of the 

pine, fir, and some other cone-bear¬ 
ing trees. American turpentine is 
got mostly from the long-leaved 


pine, which grows in Georgia, North 
Carolina, and Florida. A cut is 
made through the bark of the tree, 
and the sap flows out and is caught 
in pails or jars set to catch it. This, 
which is called crude turpentine, 
looks much like honey. Spirits or 
oil of turpentine is made from crude 
turpentine by distillation (see Al¬ 
cohol), the solid part which is left 
being the common yellow resin used 
in making soap, candles, varnish, 
fireworks, for caulking the seams of 
ships, and for putting on violin 
bows. Oil of turpentine is used in 
medicine, in making varnishes, and 
for mixing with paints. When dis¬ 
tilled a second time and purified it 
becomes camphine, once much used 
to burn in lamps. 

Canada Turpentine, called also 
Canada balsam, is got from the 
balm of Gilead, a kind of FIR tree. 
Venice turpentine is the sap of the 
larch tree, and Strasburg turpentine 
the sap of the silver fir tree. 
Another kind of turpentine is made 
in Syria and some of the Greek 
Islands from the same tree on which 
the pistachio nut grows. 

The word turpentine is from the 
Latin terebinthus , Greek terebinthos , 
the turpentine tree. 

TURQUOISE, a mineral of a beau¬ 
tiful sky-blue color, much prized for 
ornaments. It is found chiefly in 
the mountains of Khorasan, in Per¬ 
sia. It is said that the Shah keeps 
all the best turquoises for himself, 
and will let only the poor ones be 
taken away. In the East turquoises 
are used to ornament fine bridles, 
saddles, girdles, swords, and other 
things. In Europe and this country 
they are set in jewellery with pearls 
and diamonds. The turquoise is 
sometimes given as a pledge of love, 
in the belief that its color will fade if 
the giver be unfaithful; but in reality 
thecolor will often change in damp air. 

The turquoise is so called because 
it was first brought from Turkey. 

TURTLE and TORTOISE. Tur¬ 
tles live in the sea, while tortoises live 






TURTLE and TORTOISE 


625 


TURTLE and TORTOISE 


mostly on land, but sometimes in 
marshes and rivers. The skeleton of 
turtles and tortoises is mostly on the 
outside, and forms a kind of bony 
house into which they can draw 
themselves when attacked. In 
some of the tortoises this bony 
covering is so jointed that they can 
shut it up close after drawing in 
their heads, legs, and tails. The 
under part, which takes the place 
of the breast bone in other ani¬ 
mals, is usually made up of one 
piece, but the upper is made up of 
many plates of bone, nicely fitted 
together and overlapping each 
other. The inside part of the 
skeleton of a turtle can be seen in 
the picture on page 509. 

Sea turtles swim very easily, and 
they can stay a long time under 
water. The opening to the nose is 
covered by a lump of flesh which 
acts like a valve, opening when 
they breathe the air, but closing 
tight when they go under water. 
They have no teeth, but their jaws 
are edged with a hard and sharp 
kind of horn, like the beaks of birds 
of prey. The tough stems of sea¬ 
weeds, on which they feed, are more 
easily cut by these scissor-like jaws, 
the shape of which can be seen in 
the picture, than they could be by 
teeth. Crustaceans too and even 
MOLLUSKS are crushed by them. 



Head of Turtle. 


The Loggerhead Turtle is one of 
the most common kind, being found 
along the Atlantic coast from Vir¬ 
ginia to Brazil, on the Atlantic 
coasts of Europe, and in the Medi¬ 
terranean. It is also one of the 
largest of the turtles, being gener¬ 


ally about four feet long, and has a 
smooth shell, as shown in the pic¬ 
ture. This turtle feeds mostly on 
mollusks, the shells of which it 
crushes in its strong jaws. The 
flesh of the young is sometimes 
eaten, but that of old ones is valu¬ 



Loggerhead Turtle. 


able only for the oil which is boiled 
out of it and which is good for burn¬ 
ing in lamps. 

The Green Turtle, which is named 
from its green fat, from which tur¬ 
tle soup is made, is found chiefly in 
the West Indies, whence great num¬ 
bers are sent alive to this country 
and to Europe. These turtles come 
ashore in warm weather to lay their 
eggs in holes which they dig in the 
sand, and are then easily caught, 
either with HARPOONS or by turn¬ 
ing them over on their backs, for 
when turned over they cannot get 
back again. They often go hun¬ 
dreds of miles out to sea, and 
are sometimes caught sleeping on 
the top of the water. In the Pa¬ 
cific islands they are chased by the 
natives in canoes. When the canoe 
comes up with a turtle it dives, but 
the water is so clear that it can still 
be seen and followed, and when it 
comes up again a man in the bow 






TURTLE and TORTOISE 


626 


TYPE 


jumps on to its back and clings to 
its shell until it is tired out, when it 
is easily taken. The Chinese have 
a still more curious way of catching 
turtles. They have a kind of fish 
called the sucking-fish, which they 
put into the water with a string tied 
to its tail. The fish darts at the tur¬ 
tle and holds fast to it with its suck¬ 
ing mouth, and both fish and turtle 
are then drawn into the boat. The 
green turtle sometimes grows as 
long as a man and weighs five hun¬ 
dred or six hundred pounds. 

The Hawk’s Bill Turtle, so called 
because its upper jaw is hooked like 
the beak of a hawk, is found in the 
West Indies and other warm parts 
of America, and in the Pacific and 
Indian oceans. It is seldom more 
than three feet long ; its flesh is not 
very good to eat, and it is sought 
after only on account of its beautiful 
horny plates, the tortoise-shell 
of trade. These are yellow above, 
marked with rich brown and reddish 
tints, and yellowish white below. 
The best tortoise shell is brought 
from Singapore and Canton. 

Tortoises. There are several kinds 
of tortoises in the United States, 
most of which are small; but the 
snapping turtle, found from Maine 
to Georgia, is sometimes four feet 
long. It is so called because it 
snaps fiercely at any thing within its 
reach, and when it bites a thing it 
is very hard to make it let go. It 
feeds mostly on fish, reptiles, and 
water fowl. Other kinds in the 
United States are the spotted tor¬ 
toise, the box tortoise, the gopher tor¬ 
toise, the soft-shell tortoise, the mud 
tortoise, and the terrapin. The ter¬ 
rapin, of which there are several 
kinds, is much esteemed for food. 

Turtles and tortoises form one of 
the orders in the class REPTILES. 
The order is also called chelonia , 
from the Greek chelone , tortoise. 

The word turtle is Anglo-Saxon, 
and means turtle-dove; and the 
name is said to have been given to 
the turtle in the West Indies by the 


English on account of its affection 
for its mate. Tortoise is said by 
some to be from the Latin tortos, 
twisted, and the animal is said to 
have been so called from its crooked 
feet. Both these derivations are 
very doubtful. 

TYPE, a letter for printing. The 
form of a type is shown in the pic¬ 
ture : the part marked a is called 
the body, b the face, c 
the shoulder, d the 
nick, and e the groove. 

The face is the part 
with which the print¬ 
ing is done. The nick, 
which is always on the 
lower side of a type, is 
to help the compositor 
(see Printing) in 
picking it up. The 
compositor feels the 
nick with his fingers as 
he sets the type up in his stick, and 
thus knows that all the letters are 
right side up. Some type have two, 
three, or four nicks, which serve to 
mark different fonts or sets, all of 
one kind being marked in the same 
way. The groove in the bottom of 
a type is to make it stand up steady 
on the imposing table. If the type 
were flat on the bottom a little dust 
on the table would make it stand 
uneven. 

A full set of types of one kind, 
enough for printing, is called a fount 
or font. A fount of type does not 
have the same number of each letter 
of the alphabet, for many more of 
some letters are used than of others. 
If it has one of the letter z, it will 
have sixty of e, forty-five of /, and 
forty each of a, i, n y o, and s. You 
will see from this that the letter e is 
used more often in printing than 
any other letter. The types in an or¬ 
dinary book-fount are 
CAPITALS, 

SMALL CAPITALS, 

lower-case or small letters, 
ITALIC CAPITALS , 

and lower-case Italics , 
and figures and punctuation marks, 



Type. 










TYPE 


627 


TYPE 


in all about two hundred different 
characters. Printers have a differ¬ 
ent name for each size of type. 

The principal sizes used in book 
printing are : 

Nonpareil—abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. 

Minion—abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. 

Brevier—abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw 
xyz. 

Bourgeois—abcdefghijklmnopq 
rstuvwxyz. 

Long Primer—abcdefghijklmno 
pqrstuvwxyz. 

Small Pica—abcdefghijklm 
nopqrstuvwxyz. 

Pica—abcdefghijklmnop 
q rstuvwxyz. 

English—abcdefghijk 
lmnopqrstuvwxyz. 

The type of this cyclopaedia is 
bourgeois. 

Type Making. Most types are cast 



coarse work, are cut out of wood. 
In old times printers used to cast 
their own types, but now they are 
made by men called type-founders, 
who make a business of it. The 
first step is to cut a punch or die, 
one of which has to be made for 
every letter. The letter is cut by a 
die-cutter (see Die), exactly like the 
letter on a type, on the end of a lit¬ 
tle bar of soft steel. The steel is 
then hardened and the dye is ready 
for use. The workman now takes 
a little piece of copper, and setting 
the letter end of the die on it, strikes 
the other end with a hammer until 
the letter on the die is pressed into 
the copper so as to make an exact 
impression of it. The piece of cop¬ 
per is then carefully cut down until | 
it is exactly the width of the type to j 
be cast and will fit into the end of 
the mould. This little piece of cop- j 
per is called a matrix . The mould ' 


is a small frame or box, made in two 
parts so that it will open on a hinge. 
When it is shut up the inside, which 
is made of steel, forms a little box 
exactly the size of the type to be cast. 
If you look at a lot of types together, 
you will see that some of them are 
wider than others : the letter /, for 
instance, is very narrow, while m 
and w are four or five times as wide ; 
but all the types are of exactly the 
same height. Now, as only one 
mould is used in casting all the let- 
j ters in one alphabet, it is so made 
I that it can be set wide or narrow, 

I so as to fit any type or any matrix, 
j The matrix is fitted at one end of 
the mould so that the letter on it will 
come right in the middle of the lit¬ 
tle box. At the other end of the 
mould is a place to pour in the 
melted metal. 

Type metal is an ALLOY made up 
! of lead, antimony, tin, and some- 
! times a little copper. More lead is 
j used than any thing else ; the anti- 
j mony hardens it, and the tin and 
copper make it toug-h. When it is 
poured into the mould it fills up the 
letter in the matrix and the little 
box which makes the body of the 
type, and cools at once. The work¬ 
man then opens the mould, throws 
out the type, and closes it ready to 
be filled up again. This was once 
always done by hand, but types are 
now cast by machines which do it 
much quicker. When the types come 
from the mould they have rough 
edges and there is a little piece 
of metal hanging to the bottom 
where the lead was poured in. This 
little piece is broken off by a boy, and 
the types are then sent to another 
boy who rubs them on a stone and 
makes them smooth. They are next 
examined to see if the edges are ex¬ 
actly square, and the groove is cut 
in the bottom of each. They are 
then put up in papers, each letter 
by itself, when they are ready for 
sale. 

The word type is from the Latin 
tyPus , Greek tupos , a stamp. 








UMBRELLA. Although umbrel¬ 
las have been in use in Asia from 
the oldest times, they were not gen¬ 
erally carried by men in Europe and 
in this country until about a hun¬ 
dred years ago. The first umbrella 
ever used in the streets of London 
was carried, about i 75 °- by Mr. 
Jonas Hanway, who had seen them 
in China and other parts of the East. 
It is said that when he first walked 
the streets with one on a rainy day 
he was hooted and hissed by men 
and boys, and even pelted with 
stones. Before that time an um¬ 
brella was usually kept in the halls 
of houses of the rich and was held 
by a servant over the heads of peo¬ 
ple as they passed to and from their 
carriages on rainy days ; but the 
man who was afraid of a wetting 
was thought to be very weak. In 
an old English dictionary (Kersey, 
1708) an umbrella is defined to be a 
“ screen commonly used by women 
to keep off rain.” 

Chinese and Japanese umbrellas 
are much like ours, but the frames 
are generally of bamboo and have 
many more ribs than ours. The 
best ones are covered with silk, 
but most of them are made of 
paper, prettily painted and glazed, 
and made water-proof. In China 
people of different rank are some¬ 
times known by the number of their 
umbrellas. Thus the emperor has 
twenty-four carried before him, the 
heir to the crown ten, and other 
princes and nobles five, three, two, 
etc., according to their rank. 

One of the titles of the King of 


Siam is ‘‘supreme owner of the um¬ 
brella.” This does not mean a 
common umbrella, but the umbrella 
of state, which is made of crimson 
or purple silk richly set with pre¬ 
cious stones, trimmed with gold 
fringe, and lined with white satin 
wrought with silver flowers and seed 
pearls. An umbrella like this is 
carried over the king’s head wher¬ 
ever he goes, and any other person 
using one like it in that country 
would be punished with death. On 
very great occasions umbrellas sev¬ 
eral stories high, placed one above 
the other, so as to make a pyramid, 
and with all their edges hung with 
little bells, are used. In Burmah the 
king’s umbrella is white and those 
of the nobles of the court red for 
use in the royal city, but in other 
places they have gilded ones. 

Great numbers of fine umbrellas 
and parasols are made in this coun¬ 
try. Common umbrella sticks are 
made of maple wood, turned round 
on a lathe, and bent at the end. 
The best sticks are of bamboo, 
orange, myrtle, dogwood, and pi¬ 
mento ; and some have handles fitted 
to them of ivory, horn, tortoise shell, 
and other materials. The ribs are 
now mostly made of steel, though 
bamboo and whalebone are used in 
some cheap umbrellas. The best um¬ 
brellas are covered with silk; cheaper 
ones with alpaca, cotton, and thin 
india-rubber cloth. Umbrella silk is 
brought chiefly from Lyons, France, 
and Crefeld, Germany. 

The word umbrella is made from 
the Latin word umbra, a shade. 


628 




UNIVERSE 


629 


UNIVERSE 


The word parasol is made up of the 
French wor sparer, toward off, and 
the Latin word sol, the sun. 

UNIVERSE. When we look up 
into the sky at night the stars ap¬ 
pear to be scattered over a great 
vault, and one does not look any 
further off from us than another. 
The moon too looks larger than 
the stars, though it is really a great 
deal smaller. It looks larger only 
because it is nearer to us, many of 
the stars being so far away that our 
minds are not able to even think of 
the distance. There is reason to be¬ 
lieve that some of the nearest of the 
stars are several hundred times 
larger than the sun. Indeed, all 
these distant stars, which are so far 
away that they look like little specks 
in the sky, are really great suns like 
ours, and each is the centre of a 
group of bodies like the earth, which 
turn around it just as the earth turns 
round the sun. The bodies which 
turn round these far-away suns are 
so small that we cannot see them, 
but it is believed that they are there 
and that each one of them gets light 
and heat from its sun just as we do 
from ours. 

Thus we see that the universe is 
formed of many worlds or groups 
of bodies, each made up of a sun 
with other bodies turning round it. 
Each of these groups is called a sys¬ 
tem (Greek systema, a group of 
many things). The group to which 
the earth belongs is called the solar 
system, because the sun (Latin sol) 
is the centre of it. It is made up of 
the sun and of eight bodies called 
Janets (Greek planetes, wandering), 
ecause they appear to wander 
among the stars. The earth, which 
is one of the eight, is also called a 
planet because, though we cannot 
see it, it would appear to an astron¬ 
omer on any of the other planets to 
wander just as the others appear to 
us. The planets turn round the sun 
at different distances from it. The 
one nearest to the sun is Mercury, 
and after it come in order Venus, • 


the earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, 
Uranus, and Neptune. All of these, 
excepting the earth, are named after 
the gods of ancient Rome. Mer¬ 
cury, Venus, and Mars, are smaller 
than the earth ; all the others are 
much larger. Several of these plan¬ 
ets have smaller bodies called sat¬ 
ellites (Latin satelles, an attendant) 
which turn round them. Our-moon 
is the satellite of the earth. Mer¬ 
cury and Venus have no satellites, 
but Mars has two moons, Jupiter 
four moons, Saturn eight large 
moons besides three great rings sup¬ 
posed to be made up of many small 
satellites, Uranus four moons, and 
Neptune one moon. Besides the 
planets there are many smaller bod¬ 
ies, called asteroids (Greek aster, 
star, and eidos, form) because they 
are like stars in form, which move 
round the sun between Mars and 
Jupiter. They can only be seen 
through a TELESCOPE. These are 
all the real members of the solar sys¬ 
tem, but there are some other mov¬ 
ing bodies, such as comets and me¬ 
teors or falling stars, which may be 
looked upon as visitors, as they 
come only now and then. Comets 
usually come from outside the solar 
system, pass round the sun and 
then go back again. There are 
many of them, but most of them 
are too small to be seen with the 
naked eye. Those which we see 
have bright heads and long fiery 
tails, but we do not know much 
about them. Meteors or falling 
stars have sometimes fallen to the 
earth, so that we have been able to 
see what they are made of. Some 
of them are like our metals and 
some are stony. As they rush 
through our atmosphere or air they 
become heated so hot that they burn 
and we can then see them. Some 
think that comets are partly made 
up of the same kind of matter as 
meteors, which are now known to 
also go round the sun. In ancient 
times comets were looked on with 
great awe, and were thought to 





UNIVERSE 


630 


UNIVERSE 


bring all kinds of troubles, and even 
in these days some people are 
frightened by them. 

The picture gives a view of the 
solar system as it would look if seen 
from above, but the sizes of the 
different bodies and their distances 
from each other cannot be given in 
so small a space. The sun is more 
than seven hundred times larger 
than all the planets put together. 
If a globe a little more than two 


feet across stood for the sun, the 
proper size of Mercury would be 
shown by a grain of mustard seed, 
of Venus by a pea, of the earth by 
a little larger pea, of Mars by a large 
pin’s head, of the asteroids by grains 
of fine sand, of Jupiter by an orange, 
of Saturn by a smaller orange, of 
Uranus by a full-sized cherry, and of 
Neptune by a good-sized plum. It 
would be much harder to tell about 
the distance from the sun of the 



different planets, because even the 
nearest one is so far off that the 
mind can scarcely take it in. The 
distance from the earth to the sun 
is so great (92,000,000 miles) that if 
there were a railway between them 
and a train, going a mile a minute, 
or sixty miles an hour, should start 
from th'e earth on the first of January, 
1880, it would not get to the sun 
before the year 2055. If a cannon 
ball shot from a gun should keep on 


[ going at the same speed it had when 
it left the gun it would take it nine 
years to reach the sun ; and if a boy 
i could walk four miles an hour and 
keep it up for ten hours every day, 
it would take him more than six thou¬ 
sand three hundred years to get to 
the sun. Neptune, the planet most 
distant from the sun, is more than 
thirty times further from it than the 
earth is. Only a faint idea can be 
got from this of the great size of the 













UNIVERSE 


631 


UNIVERSE 


solar system ; but when we think 
that the solar system is only a very 
small part of the universe, and that 
there are many million other such 
systems beyond ours, we are lost in 
wonder and admiration. 

All the planets and their moons 
are, like the earth, cool bodies, and 
therefore give out no light of their 
own. They look light to us be¬ 
cause they reflect the light of the 
sun. Venus is the brightest of them 
all, and Jupiter is the next brightest. 
Mars looks reddish to the naked 
eye, but is bright when seen through 
a telescope. Mercury, Venus, Mars, 
Jupiter, and Saturn can be seen 
with the naked eye at the right sea¬ 
sons, but the others can only be seen 
through a telescope. 

The path of a planet or other 
body through the heavens is called 
an orbit (Latin orbita, a track, from 
or bis, a circle). The orbits of the 
planets and of a comet round the 
sun, and of the moon round the 
earth are shown in the picture. 
The time taken by a planet in going 
round its orbit makes its year, and 


this is different in each one. Mer¬ 
cury goes round the sun once in 
eighty-four days, so its year is less 
than a quarter as long as ours. Venus 
takes two hundred and twenty-four 
days to go round, the earth just a year 
( 3 ^ 5 i days). Mars nearly two years 
(686 days), Jupiter more than eleven 
years (4333 days), Saturn nearly 
thirty years (10,759 days), Uranus 
about eighty-four years(30,686 days), 
and Neptune more than one hundred 
and sixty-four years (60,126 days). 

But besides this motion round the 
sun the planets have another motion : 
each one spins round like a top, both 
motions going on at the same time. 
The time taken by each planet in 
turning round once makes its day, 
which is of a different length in 
each. The earth turns round once 
in twenty-four hours, Mercury once 
in twenty-four and a half hours, Ju¬ 
piter in about ten hours and Saturn 
in about ten and a half hours. We 
do not know exactly how long it 
takes the others to spin round. 

The word universe is from the 
I Latin universum , the whole world. 





V 


VALVE, a cover to a tube or a 
hole in a vessel, which will open 
and let water or any other fluid pass 
in one way, but stops it from go¬ 
ing the other way. The pressure 
of the fluid opens the valve and 
closes it. Three 
kinds of valves are 
shown in the pic- 
Flap Valve. tures, the flap- 
valve, which 
opens and shuts like a door ; the 
puppet-valve, which is moved up 
and down by a rod fastened to it; 



Puppet Valve. 


and the ball-valve, which is opened 
and shut by a ball which moves up 
and down. The flap-valve is the 
kind used in pumps. 
The puppet-valve is 
much used in steam- 
engines. The safety- 
valve on steam-boil¬ 
ers works on this 
principle, but has a 
certain weight put 
on it so that it will 
Ball Valve. rise up only when 
the steam makes a 
pressure greater than the weight. 
Thus, when there is too much steam 
in the boiler, the valve will be 
forced open and the boiler thus 
saved from bursting. Another kind 
of valve used in steam-engines is 
called a slide-valve ; it is a cup 



shaped piece of metal which is slid 
on and off so as to cover and to un¬ 
cover a hole to let steam pass and 
repass to the engine. The ball- 
valve is used in different kinds of 
machines. 

The word valve is from the Latin 
valves, folding doors. 

VANILLA, the common name of 
the fruit of a Mexican plant, much 
used for flavoring in cookery. The 
plant is a climbing plant, some like 
the ivy, which grows on trees but 
lives on air. It bears greenish-yel¬ 
low flowers, which are followed by 
a slender pod, about eight inches 
long. The pods are picked before 
they are quite ripe, because when 
fully ripe they split in two. They 
are pulpy inside and are filled with 
small black oily seeds. When dried 
in the sun the pods grow brown and 
wrinkled, and shrink into one fourth 
of their former size. They are 
packed for market in bundles of fifty 
to a hundred, and covered with tin 
foil or put into metal boxes. 

Vanilla comes mostly from Mexico, 
but some is also raised in Central and 
South America, and the West Indies. 
It was used by the Mexicans for fla¬ 
voring chocolate long before the 
Spaniards came to America. It is 
still used for the same purpose, the 
little seeds being ground up with 
the chocolate. Ice cream, confec¬ 
tionery, cake, etc., are usually fla¬ 
vored with the extract of vanilla, 
made by cutting the pods into 
small pieces, grinding them up 
with sugar, and then mixing the 
paste with weak alcohol. Vanilla 


632 















VARNISH 


633 


VELOCIPEDE 


ones are mostly used by young 
children, as two-wheeled ones are 
much harder to ride. The two¬ 
wheeled velocipede has one large 
wheel, and a second small wheel 
which runs behind, the rider’s seat 
being above between the two. 

The Bicycle, the form of which 
is shown in the picture, differs 
from the two-wheeled velocipede 
in having the rider’s seat nearly 
over the middle of the front wheel, 
instead of back of it, so that the 
legs work up and down like the 
motion of a person walking, instead 
of having to be pushed forward. 



Bicycle. 


is now made also from the wood of 
the pine tree. 

The word vanilla is Spanish and 
means a little sheath, and the va¬ 
nilla is so called because its pods 
look like a little knife sheath. 

VARNISH, a kind of paint made 
out of resins or gum resins, mixed 
with spirit or some other liquid, 
used on things to make them shine 
or to protect them against air or 
dampness. The chief resins used 
are copal, mastic, lac, benzoin, 
resin, amber, asphalt, and caout¬ 
chouc ; and the chief liquids with 
which they are mixed are alcohol, 
turpentine, ether, and 
olive, linseed, and poppy 
oils. Some kind of color¬ 
ing matter is also usually- 
put in. Varnishes are 
made by boiling together 
the things of which they 
are made, and frequently 
stirring and straining. As 
the resins, oils, etc., are 
liable to take fire, it is a 
very dangerous business. 

Varnishes are used on 
many kinds of metals, on 
plain and painted woods, 
on leather, and many 
other things. 

The word varnish is 
in old English vernish , 
which is probably from a 
Latin word meaning to 
glaze. 

VELOCIPEDE. The first veloci¬ 
pede was made in 1817 by Karl 
von Drais, of Mannheim, Germany, 
and was called after him a “ drai- 
sine.” It was made some like the 
present two-wheeled velocipede, but 
the rider had to make it go by push¬ 
ing with his feet on the ground. 
This kind did not come much into 
use, but about 1867 velocipedes be¬ 
gan to be made with a crank or kind 
of handle on each side of the fore 
wheel to be turned by the feet, like 
those now in use. Velocipedes are 
made with two, three, or four 
wheels. Three and four-wheeled 


By this arrangement of the seat, too, 
a much larger front wheel can be 
used, which makes the machine 
much faster than the velocipede. 
There are a great many bicycles in 
use in England, where they are 
much ridden for exercise. Races 
are also run with them, and al¬ 
though a horse can go faster than a 
man on a bicycle for a short dis¬ 
tance, it cannot keep up with one for 
a long distance. The quickest time 
made by any one on the bicycle up 
to the present time (1879) is as fol¬ 
lows : one mile, 2 minutes and 52£ 
seconds ; ten miles, 33 minutes; 
















VELVET 


634 


VERDIGRIS 


twenty miles, 1 hour, 5 minutes, and 
34 seconds ; fifty miles, 3 hours, 6 
minutes, and 45 seconds. In 1879 
a man in London rode on a bicycle 
one thousand one hundred and seven¬ 
ty-two miles in six days. Very fine 
bicycles are now made in this country. 

The word velocipede is from the 
Latin velox , swift, and pedes , feet. 
Bicycle is from the Latin bis , twice, 
and the Greek kuklos, circle. 

VELVET, a kind of cloth woven 
of silk or of silk and cotton mixed, 
and having a soft pile or nap. Vel¬ 
vet all made of cotton is called vel¬ 
veteen. A kind of stuff like velvet, 
made of worsted and goats’ hair, is 
called plush. In weaving velvet a 
third set of threads, besides the 
warp and woof threads, are woven 
over brass wires laid crosswise, thus 
making little rows of loops. Each 
wire has a little groove or slit along 
its top, and along this is run a 
sharp-edged knife, thus cutting all 
the loops so that they will stand up. 
These are afterward brushed up 
and sheared smooth to make the 
nap. In fine velvets there are fifty 
or sixty rows of loops in every inch, 
so that weaving them is very slow 
work. Striped and plaided velvets 
are made by cutting some of the 
loops and leaving others uncut ; and 
some velvet is left altogether uncut, 
the wires being drawn out so as to 
leave the loops standing. 

The word velvet is from the Latin 
vellus , a fleece, which is soft like 
velvet. 

VENEER, a thin layer of wood 
glued upon a cheaper kind of wood 
to give it a finish. As veneers are 
made of handsome and costly kinds 
of wood, such as rosewood, ebony, 
mahogany, etc., they are usually cut 
very thin, to make them go as far 
as possible. They used to be cut by 
hand, but they could not be made 
very thin or very even in that way, 
and they are now sawn from solid 
blocks or logs of wood by circular 
saws turned by machinery. By this 
means veneers are cut very wide 


and as thin as cardboard. When 
the cabinet maker uses veneers he 
roughens one side to make it stick 
better, and then glues it on the board 
to be covered and clamps it tight 
until it is fully dry. The other side 
is then smoothed with planes and 
scrapers, and polished with sand¬ 
paper and pumice, when it may be 
finished by varnishing, or oiling. 

Veneers are sometimes made of 
ivory, malachite, and other things. 
A pianoforte was veneered in Paris 
with ivory cut from a single ele¬ 
phant’s tusk, and in Russia tables 
and other furniture are sometimes 
covered with veneers of malachite 
sawn very thin and fitted together 
so that all the veins of the stone 
are made to match. When veneers 
of different colors are fitted together 
in patterns so as to make a kind of 
inlay work, it is called buhl-work, 
from a French cabinet maker named 
Buhl, who lived in the time of 
Louis XIV. Buhl-work is also 
made sometimes of thin brass and 
tortoise shell. 

The word veneer is in German 
furnieren , to veneer, which is from 
the French fourtiir , to furnish. 

VERDIGRIS, the common name 
of a green substance (copper ace¬ 
tate) which collects on copper. The 
verdigris of commerce is made by 
piling up plates of copper with lay¬ 
ers of grape skins between them. 
In a few weeks a green crust forms 
on the copper ; this is scraped off, 
made into a paste with vinegar, and 
pressed into moulds. It is also 
made sometimes by putting plates 
of copper in cloths dipped in vine¬ 
gar. It often forms in copper ket¬ 
tles in which any thing sour is 
cooked, and as it is a rank poison, 
great care should be taken in clean¬ 
ing such vessels. It would be still 
better to have all such vessels tinned. 
Verdigris is used for making green 
paint, for dyeing black with log¬ 
wood, for giving a beautiful green 
to porcelain, and other purposes. 

The word verdigris is in French 







VICE 


635 


VIOLIN 


verd-de-gris , from verd, green, de, 
of, and gris, gray, which is from the 
Latin viride certs, green of brass. 

VICE, an instrument used by me¬ 
chanics to hold work in for filing, 
cutting, etc. It is made up of two 
jaws, in which the work is put, 
and a screw moved by a handle by 
which they are screwed up tight to¬ 
gether. The vice shown in the pic¬ 
ture is a kind used by machinists. 
When the handle is turned the front 
jaw moves forward or backward 
straight out from the back one, so 
that it can be made to hold large 
pieces of work. In the blacksmith’s 
vice the front jaw reaches down 
much further and is loosely fastened 


at the bottom. It cannot be opened 
quite so far as the machinist’s vice. 
Carpenters use wooden vices, made 
much like a blacksmith’s vice, to 
hold boards and other pieces of 
wood for cutting, planing,etc. Jew¬ 
ellers have very small vices made to 
be held in the hand, to hold small 
pieces of jewelry on which they 
are working. 

The word vice, or vise as it is 
sometimes spelled, is from the 
French vis , a screw. 

VINEGAR, weak acetic ACID, 
used for flavoring food, and for pre¬ 
serving pickles and other things. 

In the United States vinegar is 


made mostly out of cider. The cider 
is left in a warm place in barrels 
with their bung holes open, so that 
the air can get at it. The OXYGEN 
of the air changes the ALCOHOL in 
the cider into acetic acid ; but as 
there is not much alcohol in cider 
there is made only a little acetic 
acid, and this, mixed with the 
water of the cider and some color¬ 
ing matter and other impurities from 
the juice of the apples, makes up 
the vinegar. In England much vin¬ 
egar is made from malt and from 
soured beer and ale. In France it 
is made mostly from wine, red vine¬ 
gar being made from red wine and 
white vinegar from white wine. 

The word vinegar is 
from the French vinai- 
gre , sour wine, from vin, 
wine, and aigre, sour. 

VIOLIN, a stringed 
musical instrument, 
played with a bow. A 
violin looks to be a 
simple enough thing to 
make ; for it is made up 
of only a hollow body of 
wood, a solid wooden 
neck, some strings with 
pegs to screw them up 
with, and a small piece 
of wood called a bridge 
to lift the strings up 
from the body. All these 
things are easily shaped 
and easily put together, but while 
one violin may be a very fine one, 
another made just like it may be of 
little or no value. The reason of 
this depends on a great many things, 
such as the fineness and thinness of 
the wood, the size and form of the 
sound holes cut in the top, the 
strings, etc. The body of the vio¬ 
lin is made up of a sounding board, 
always made of straight-grained 
deal, and a back, made usually of 
maple, but sometimes of sycamore 
or pear wood. The sounding board 
and the back are very thin, and are 
arched so as to bear the great strain 
of the strings when they are screwed 
















VITRIOL 


636 


VULTURE 


up tight. Upon the neck is a finger¬ 
board made of ebony, and the bridge, 
over which the strings are stretched, 
is made of beech wood. There are 
four strings, three of which are 
made of catgut, and one of which is 
wound round with wire. The bow 
of the violin is made of a back of 
tough, springy wood, strung with 
horse hairs. When used the hairs 
are rubbed with resin to keep them 
from slipping on the violin strings. 
The best violins were made one to 
two hundred years ago, and fine 
ones are sometimes sold for $2000 
to $3000. 

A larger kind of violin is called a 
viola, and a still larger one a violon¬ 
cello. The double-bass is a stringed 
instrument of the same kind, nearly 
twice as large as the violoncello. 
All these instruments are, like the 
violin, played with a bow. 

The word violin means a little viol, 
the name of an instrument used be¬ 
fore the violin. The Anglo-Saxon 
name of the violin was fythel , from 
which comes our word fiddle. 

VITRIOL, the name given by old 
writers to copperas (IRON sulphate), 
and afterward applied to the sul¬ 
phates of other metals. Copperas 
or green vitriol is made up of iron, 
sulphur, and oxygen. It is com¬ 
monly of a grass-green color, and is 
largely used in dyeing black, and in 
making black ink. In old times 
SULPHURIC ACID was made from 
it, and was thence called oil of vit¬ 
riol. 

Blue vitriol (COPPER sulphate) is 
made up of copper, sulphur, and 
oxygen. It is much used in the 
arts, especially in dyeing and in the 
manufacture of green paints ; and in 
medicine it is given as an emetic to 
cause vomiting, and used as a caus¬ 
tic. 

White vitriol (ZINC sulphate) is 
made up of zinc, sulphur, and oxy¬ 
gen. It is used in medicine as an 
emetic, as a gargle for sore throat, 
and in diseases of the eyes ; it is 
also put into oil paints to make them 


dry quicker, and is used in printing 
cotton cloths to fasten the colors. 

The word vitriol is from the 
Latin vitrum , glass, and vitriol was 
so called because it sometimes 
looks like glass. 

VULTURE, a bird of prey which 
lives mostly on carrion or dead ani¬ 
mal matter. It is somewhat like 
the falcon, but has a weaker beak 
and claws and longer wings, and 
does not stand upright, but generally 
stoops a little. The falcon, too, likes 
living prey the best, but the vulture 
prefers putrid or spoiled flesh. Vul¬ 
tures fly very high, and their eyes are 
so strong that they can see great 
distances. If the body of an animal 
should be left anywhere, they are sure 
to see it, and they fly down to it in 
such haste that they often tumble 
over and over each other. They 
soon pick the body clean, leaving 
nothing but the bones ; and they are 
thus very useful in hot countries, 
clearing away all the animal matter 
which if left to decay might make 
disease. They are cowardly and 
filthy birds, and always have a bad 
smell about them. Their flesh is 
not fit for food. 

The Lammergeyer, sometimes 
called the bearded griffon and the 
golden vulture, lives in the highest 
mountains of Europe, Asia, and 
Africa, and builds its nest among 
the rocks in the wildest places. It 
is the largest bird of prey of the Old 
World, being sometimes nearly as 
long as a man. It is very strong, 
and will kill calves, sheep, deer, 
chamois, and other small quadru¬ 
peds. One has been known, too, to 
attack children. It is said that the 
lammergeyer will watch deer and 
chamois on the mountains until it 
sees one near the edge of a preci¬ 
pice, and will then fly against it sud¬ 
denly and throw it over. 

The Condor is the largest vulture 
of the New World. It is found 
chiefly on the western side of the 
Andes, in Bolivia, Peru, and Chili. 
It passes the night on the highest 




VULTURE 


637 


VULTURE 


peaks of the mountains, and at sun¬ 
rise spreads its wings and flies off 
in search of prey. When up among 
the clouds it can see everything go¬ 
ing on in the plain below, and when 
any prey comes in sight it folds its 
wings and drops down with great 
speed. The condor is about four 
feet long, has bluish black feathers 
on the body, with a white downy 
collar round the base of the neck, 
and a bare head and neck. It is 
very strong, but never attacks living 
animals unless they are worn out 
with sickness or old age. Condors 
watch the caravans cross the plains 
of South America, and when a poor 
horse or mule falls down with 
fatigue they attack it and often be¬ 
gin to eat it before it is dead. Worn 
out or sick travellers have some¬ 
times been torn to pieces by them. 
When the condor is gorged with 
food, it becomes so heavy and sleepy 
that it cannot fly. The Indians 
then hunt them on horseback, lasso 
them, and beat them to death with 
clubs. 

The Turkey Buzzard is a kind of 
vulture found in the United States 
and in Canada. It is about two 
and a half feet long, and is generally 
brownish black with a bright red 


head and neck. It is very plentiful 
in the Southern States, where it may 
often be seen in flocks of twenty or 
thirty. It loves to roost in swamps 
or tall dead trees, flying out in the 
day time in search of dead animals 
for food. Sometimes it will kill 
small animals, and even large ones 
in fields when they are sick and 
weak. Turkey buzzards often come 
into the streets in cities and towns 
in the South, and eat any dead food 
or animal filth they can find. 

The Carrion Crow, or black vul¬ 
ture, is found in the Southern States 
and in Central and South America. 
It is about two feet long, is shiny 
black, and looks some like a crow, 
but it is not a crow but a vulture. 
It may often be seen in company 
with turkey buzzards, and helps 
them to clear up the carrion from 
fields and streets. In South Amer¬ 
ica thousands of them sit during the 
day on the roofs of houses in cities, 
asleep in the hot sun with their 
heads under their wings. 

The vulture belongs to the order 
rapt ores , or BIRDS of prey. 

The word vulture is from the Lat¬ 
in vultur , vulture. Condor is 
Spanish, and is from citntur, the 
Peruvian name of the bird. 






WALNUT, the common name of 
several kinds of nut-bearing trees, 
of the same family with the hickory. 
The fruit commonly called walnut 
in the United States is properly 
a HICKORY nut. The true walnuts 
which grow wild in this country are 
the white walnut or butternut 
and the black walnut. 

The Black Walnut grows almost 
all over the United States, but is 
more plentiful in the West than in 
the East. It is a very large, fine- 
looking tree, and its wood is hard, 
fine-grained, and lasting. When 
first cut it is purplish-brown, but 
it grows dark-brown with age. It 
takes a fine polish, and is much used 
for furniture and cabinet work, gun- 
stocks, etc. The fruit is about as 
large as that of the butternut, and 
has a very hard ridgy shell, which is 
black when ripe. The kernel is rich 
and oily, but soon spoils. 

The European Walnut, called 
also English walnut and Madeira 
nut in this country, grows in Asia 
and nearly all over Europe. Its 
wood is not so handsome as that of 
the black walnut, but is much used 
for cabinet work, especially in 
France. In this country this wood 
is often called French walnut. The 
nuts are larger than our hickory nuts, 
and have a smooth, thin shell. Most 
of those brought to the United States 
come from Naples, Sicily, and Bor¬ 
deaux. In countries where the tree 
abounds the nuts are pressed for 
their oil, which is eaten like olive 
oil. A coarser kind of oil, made by 
a second pressing, is much used by 


artists and for making the best kind 
of printers’ ink. Walnut wine is 
made from the sap of the tree, which 
is quite sweet. 

The word walnut is from the 
Anglo-Saxon wealh-knut ', German 
Walsche Nuss, foreign nut, the 
walnut having grown first in Italy, 
which the Germans call Walschland , 
foreign land 

WASP. There are two classes of 
wasps : social wasps, which live to¬ 
gether in families or societies in one 
large nest, sometimes having in it 
as many as three or four hundred, 
and solitary wasps, which build 
small nests of two or three cells, 
made usually out of mud and plas¬ 
tered against a wall or paling. The 
nests of the social wasps are built 
usually on the branches of trees, in 
the way told about under hornet ; 
but some kinds dig holes called bur¬ 
rows in the ground or use some hole 
already dug to build their nests in. 
In winter almost all the social wasps 
are killed by the cold, but a few fe¬ 
males live in a torpid or numb state 
until spring and lay eggs for the 
next summer’s colony. They do 
not use the same nest a second sea¬ 
son, but go off separately and each 
one begins a new nest by making a 
few cells to lay eggs in. Larvae, or 
grubs, are hatched from the eggs ; 
these change into pupae, which are 
shut up in the cells until they are 
ready to come out as wasps (see In¬ 
sects). The -first brood are all 
workers, and as soon as they grow 
up they build more cells, and the 
female or queen, as she is called, 


638 



WATCH 


639 


WATCH 


goes on laying more eggs all sum¬ 
mer. 

Sand and wood wasps belong to 
the solitary kinds, which do not live 
in societies. The females dig out 
cells in rotten wood or in the 
ground, in each of which an egg is 
laid. A living spider or other insect, 
stung so that it is numb, is next put 
in and the cell is then closed. When 
the larva is hatched, it feeds on the 
insect. Sand wasps have stiff 
brushes on their legs with which 
they dig the holes for their cells, 
and wood wasps have strong jaws 
with which they burrow into wood. 

The word wasp is Anglo-Saxon, 
and is from the Latin vespa , wasp. 

WATCH, a small time-piece to be 
carried in the pocket. A watch is only 
a little CLOCK, the train of wheels 
in each being much the same, but 
in the watch the mainspring and 
the balance take the place of the 
weight and the pendulum in the 
clock. The mainspring, which is the 
part that is wound up and which 
moves the train of wheels, is a coil of 
narrow ribbon-like steel. When 
this is wound up tight by turning 
the watch key, it tries to unwind it¬ 
self and thus acts on the train of 
wheels just as the weight of the 
clock does ; and just as the pendu¬ 
lum of the clock causes the weight 
to fall slowly, so the balance of the 
watch causes the spring to unwind 
slowly and evenly. The balance is 
made up of the balance wheel a , 
and the hair spring b , as shown in 
the picture. By means of this 
wheel and spring the teeth, c and d , 
of the pallet are made to move back¬ 
ward and forward with a very regu¬ 
lar motion, letting out the teeth of 
the scape wheel e , which is moved 
by the mainspring, one by one, and 
thus causing it to run down little by 
little, just as the pendulum acts on 
the scape wheel of the clock. 

The mainspring was first made in 
the fifteenth century, but it is not 
known who found it out. Watches 
are said to have been made in Nu¬ 


remberg in 1477, and were called 
from their shape Nuremberg eggs. 
They were about as large as a goose 
egg, had to be wound up twice a 
day, and differed from the true time 
about an hour in a day ; but they 
were thought to be one of the won¬ 
ders of the world, and were sold for 
a sum which would be equal to 
about $1500 of our money. 

By the beginning of the next cen¬ 
tury great improvements were made 
in them, and the second-hand was 
added. The early watches were 
made in many curious shapes, such 
as those of pears, skulls, purses, 



and crosses. Some were set in the 
heads of canes, and some in brace¬ 
lets and other pieces of jewelry. 
None had glasses over their faces, 
but open metal-work cases, through 
which the hands could be seen. 
Many of them were made to strike 
the hours. Mary Queen of Scots had 
several watches, two of which were 
shaped like skulls, and Queen Eliz¬ 
abeth had twenty-four of different 
kinds. 

Watches could not be made to 
keep very good time until it was 
found out, about 1658, how to make 





WATCH 


640 


WATER 


the balance wheel, which makes the 
mainspring unwind evenly and regu¬ 
larly. Since that time many other 
improvements have been made, so 
that watches keep time perfectly. 
Watches are now made which can 
be wound up without keys, by turn¬ 
ing a knob on the stem. The hands 
are also turned in the same way, so 
that there is no need of opening the 
case of the watch except when it 
needs cleaning. 

Chronometer watches are so made 
that they are not changed by heat 
or cold, or by any difference of cli¬ 
mate in different countries to which 
they may be taken. They are much 
used on ships, as they keep much 
better time than any other kind of 
watches. Repeating watches are 
those which strike the hours and 
parts of hours, by touching a spring, 
so that the person using one can tell 
the time in the dark. They are not 
much used now. Racing watches 
or horse-timers have a separate sec¬ 
ond hand which can be started and 
stopped by touching a spring, so as 
to time racing horses in going round 
the track. They are made so care¬ 
fully that they will mark a small 
part of a second. 

Until within the past twenty-five 
years watches were made mostly in 
Switzerland, England, and France, 
but now a great many are made by 
machinery in the United States. 
The principal manufacturers are the 
American Watch Company, of 
Waltham, Massachusetts, and the 
National Watch Company, of Elgin, 
Illinois ; but there are also several 
others. In foreign watches each part 
of the works, is made by hand, so 
that no piece is exactly like the same 
piece in another watch, but in Amer¬ 
ican watches, where all the parts 
are cut by machines, the same part 
will fit in all watches of the same 
kind. The American watches keep 
excellent time, and many are now 
sent to Europe, where they can 
be sold cheaper than hand-made 
watches. 


The word watch is in German 
wache , watch, or look out. 

WATER. Until about a hundred 
years ago, water was thought to be 
an element; but a French chemist 
named Lavoisier found out in 1773 
that it was a compound substance, 
that is, a substance formed by the 
union of other things. We now 
know that it is made up of two 
different things, HYDROGEN and 
oxygen. It has in it two measures 
of hydrogen and one measure of ox¬ 
ygen, but the oxygen is so much 
heavier than the hydrogen that nine 
pounds of water contain eight 
pounds of oxygen and only one 
pound of hydrogen. Like the gases 
of which it is made up, pure water 
has no taste nor smell ; and like air 
it appears to be colorless when in 
thin layers, but when looked at in 
large masses, as in the sea and in 
deep lakes, it is blue (see page 201). 

At least three quarters of the 
earth’s surface is covered with 
water ; the air is full of it in the form 
of vapor, and all animal and vege¬ 
table substances and many min¬ 
eral substances are largely made up 
of it. About seven eighths of the 
human body is water. But though 
water is so plentiful, it is never 
wholly pure. The purest is that 
which falls as rain, but even this is 
soiled with matter washed out of 
the air, such as dust and smoke. 
River and lake waters are purer than 
spring and well waters, because they 
are made up of rain water and the 
water of streams which run only 
over the earth’s surface, while spring 
and well waters come up through 
the earth, where they become mixed 
with solid matter. When water 
flows through a town or near sew¬ 
ers, it takes up impurities from the 
drainage of houses, and becomes 
quite unfit to drink, being some¬ 
times even poison, typhoid fever 
often being so caused. For this 
reason most large cities are now 
supplied with pure water, collected 
in reservoirs at a distance, brought 






WATER 


641 


WATER 


to town in aqueducts or large iron 
pipes, and carried into the houses 
in smaller pipes so that it cannot be 
spoilt by mixing with the water of 
the drains. The water of Lake 
Cochituate, used in Boston, is the 
purest water carried into any city in 
the United States, having but little 
solid matter in it; the Philadelphia 
and Brooklyn waters have a little 
more ; next in purity is the Croton 
water ; while the water carried into 
Chicago from Lake Michigan has 
in it more than twice as much solid 
matter as the Boston water, and 
that carried into Albany has more 
than three times as much. 

Sea water is a kind of mineral 
water, because it has a good deal 
of the mineral salt mixed in it. The 
salt can easily be taken out of sea 
water by distillation (see ALCOHOL), 
and fresh water is often made from 
salt water in this way on ships at 
sea. Distilled water is pure water ; 
and rain water is the purest of all 
natural waters because the turning 
of the moist vapor of the clouds into 
rain is a kind of distillation. Every 
drop of running water on the globe 
has once been distilled from the 
ocean as vapor, turned into water 
again by cool air above, and sent 
back again in the form of rain, 
snow, and hail. 

Water is called hard when soap 
does not at once make a lather with 
it. The waters of springs and riv¬ 
ers may become hard in two ways : 
by running through rocks which 
have gypsum (calcium sulphate) 
in them, or through limestone rock 
or rocks or soil which have chalk 
(calcium carbonate) in them. Water 
made hard with gypsum is not 
changed by boiling, but that made 
hard by chalk or limestone becomes 
soft by boiling, and the chalky sub¬ 
stance separates from it and forms a 
white crust, such as is often seen on 
the insides of teakettles. Rainwater 
is always soft, and when it runs 
through a country where the rocks 
are granite instead of limestone and 


chalk, it remains soft. When the 
waters of springs are mixed with a 
great deal of solid matter from the 
earth and rocks through which they 
pass, they are called mineral water. 

Water also has various gases dis¬ 
solved in it. When rain falls it takes 
up CARBONIC ACID gas from the 
air. When put under pressure 
water will take up a great deal of 
this gas, as is shown in soda water. 
The oxygen of the air is also dis¬ 
solved by water, and it is this which 
gives to spring water its fresh pleas¬ 
ant taste. The dissolved oxygen in 
the waters of seas, lakes, and rivers 
is necessary for the lives of fishes, 
which take it out of the water they 
draw through their gills. This oxy¬ 
gen is not that which helps to make 
up the water, but comes from the 
air which is mixed with the water. 



Water in Different-Shaped Vessels. 


When water is at rest in any ves¬ 
sel its surface is always smooth and 
level. So also if water be put into 
a number of vessels which are con¬ 
nected with each other so that the 
water can flow freely through all of 
them, it will stand at the same level 
or height in each. It makes no 
difference whether the vessels be of 
different shape or size, or what may 
be their position; the water will 
rise to the same height in each, as 
shown in the picture. By under¬ 
standing this we are able to explain 
why water rises in springs and Arte¬ 
sian wells, and why fountains play. 
The spring is fed by some reservoir 
within the earth in which the water 
stands just as high as it rises in the 
spring. In Artesian wells the 












WATER 


642 


WATER 


water is often thrown up above the 
surface of the earth, because the 
water in the reservoir which feeds it 
stands in some part higher than the 
surface. It makes no difference how 
far away this may be ; if the water 
can flow freely it will rise nearly as 



high as its highest part. This will 
be best understood by the second 
picture, in which A and B show 
layers of ROCKS filled with water, 
and the darker parts above and be¬ 
low them strata through which water 
cannot flow. The water will flow 
from A at C as a spring, and form a 
brook. The water in B rises to the 
point H. If a hole be bored down 
from D to the water in B, the water 



will rise to E, or as high as the 
reservoir H, thus making an Arte¬ 
sian well. But if a hole be dug at F, 
the water will rise only to G, or the 
same height as H and E, and will 
thus form a common well ; and if 


the water is wanted higher it must 
be raised with a pump. 

Water in a vessel will press just 
the same in every direction, that is, 
sideway, upward, and downward. 
If a vessel filled with water and 
closed on all sides have a pipe an 
inch square set in the top with a 
piston (see Steam Engine) fitted 
into it, and a pressure of one pound 
be put on the piston, every square 
inch on the inside of the vessel, 
whether on the top, bottom, or 
sides, will have an equal pressure on 
it. If now another larger pipe fitted 
with a piston whose surface shall be 
ten times as large as the smaller one 
be also set in the top, as shown in 
the picture, where A B C D is the 



Hydrostatic Press. 


vessel, M and N the two pipes in 
the top, and P and O the pistons, 
and a weight of one pound be put 
on the piston P, a pressure of one 
pound will be made on every square 
inch of the piston O, and the 
weight of one pound on P will bear 
up a weight of ten pounds on O. 
The two pistons will thus be evenly 
balanced ; but if more weight be 
put upon P, more must also be put 
upon O, or it will not balance, but 
will be pushed upward. Suppose 
now that weight enough be put on 
to P to force it downward one inch. 
This will push one inch of water 
down the pipe M, and will force the 
same amount of water up the pipe 




































































WATER WHEELS 


643 


WAX 


N ; but as the pipe N is ten times 
larger than M, the inch of water will 
be spread over more surface, and 
the piston O will be forced up only 
one-tenth part of an inch. The 
piston P must therefore be pushed 
down ten inches to raise the piston 
O up one inch. 

This is a very important principle, 
and is put to use in a common ma¬ 
chine called the hydrostatic or hy¬ 
draulic press. This can be best un¬ 
derstood from the picture. In this 
A is a force pump which forces 
water through the pipe P into the 
cistern B. This presses upward the 
piston O with great force and presses 
anything placed between the top of 
the piston and the top of the press. 
In the picture two cotton bales are 
being pressed. This kind of press 
is much used for pressing paper and 
BOOKS, for making lead pipe, and 
for trying the strength of ropes, 
chains, and other things. 

The word water is from the Anglo- 


Saxon water . 

WATER WHEELS. Water in 
motion is used for turning machines 
chiefly by means of wheels. There 
are three principal kinds of water 
wheels, all of which may be easily 
understood by the pictures. In the 
first is shown the overshot wheel, 
which is covered with boxes called 
buckets, which catch the water as 
it flows or is shot over the top. The 
buckets on one 
side of the wheel 
are thus filled, and 
the weight of the 
water makes it 
turn round. The 
water stays in the 
buckets until 
they get to the 
bottom of the wheel, when it runs 
out, and the buckets are filled again 
when they come under the flowing 
water. The overshot wheel is used 
where there is but little water which 
has a considerable fall, as in small 
mountain brooks. 

The Undershot Wheel, shown in 



Overshot Wheel. 


the second picture, is so called 
because the water flows or is shot 
under it instead of over its top. This 
wheel has no buckets, but is fitted 
with flat boards 
called floats, and 
it is turned 
merely by the 
force of the 
stream of water 
running under it 
and striking on 
the boards. The Undershot Wheel, 
undershot wheel 

is used where there is plenty of 
water, but the fall is slight, as in 
common streams. 

The Breast Wheel, shown in the 
third picture, is so arranged that the 
water strikes the wheel at about half 
its height, and is kept close to it by 
the breasting built up under it. The 
wheel is made much like the under¬ 
shot wheel, but the boards or floats 
are set closer together. 




Wheels which work horizontally 
or flat instead of up and down are 
called turbine wheels. There are 
many kinds of them, working in 
different ways. 

Water-wheel is made up of wa¬ 
ter and the Anglo-Saxon hwiol* 
wheel. 

WAX. There are many kinds of 
wax, some of which are made by 
insects and some are the growth of 
trees. The principal insect wax is 
that made by the honey bee and out 
of which it builds its honey cells. It 
was once thought that bees gathered 
their wax from plants, but it has 













WEAKFISH 


644 


WELL 


been shown that they will make wax 
if they are shut up and fed only on 
sugar, so it is now known that they 
make it out of the sweet juices of 
plants. When the wax of the bee 
is collected by man, the honey is 
pressed out of it, and the comb is then 
boiled in water, melted, strained, 
and purified in various ways. Bees¬ 
wax is naturally yellow, but is made 
white by bleaching. Wax was 
formerly much used for candles, 
but stearine candles have nearly 
taken their place, excepting in Ro¬ 
man Catholic churches, where wax 
candles are still used. Wax is also 
used by modellers for making casts 
and moulds, and wax fruit and flow¬ 
ers. Most of the models of different 
parts of the human figure, showing 
diseases, etc., in medical museums, 
are of wax. 

Of the vegetable waxes the prin¬ 
cipal kinds are palm wax, from the 
United States of Colombia, and 
myrtle wax, called also bayberry 
tallow, made in the United States 
from the scrapings of the berries of 
the bayberry tree. 

The word wax is from the Anglo- 
Saxon weax , wax. 

WEAKFISH, a common salt-water 
fish, caught along the eastern coast 
of the United States, especially in 
warm parts. Many are caught around 
Long Island. The weakfish is 
shaped like the perch, is one to two 
feet long, and is greenish brown 
above and silvery below. Its flesh is 
good and wholesome for food, but it 
soon gets soft. It is caught in rather 
deep water and in the same way as 
the striped bass. It bites well at 
shrimp and crabs. The weakfish is 
sometimes called also wheatfish and 
squeteague. 

The weakfish is so called because 
its mouth is so weak that the hook 
often tears out. 

WEASEL. The common weasel 
of the Northern United States is only 
about six inches long, with a very 
slender body, short legs, and short 
tail with no tuft of hairs on it. A 


picture of it is given on page 378. Its 
fur is dark brown above and whit¬ 
ish below. It feeds chiefly on 
moles, mice, birds, and other small 
animals, and will often kill chickens. 
It is very bloodthirsty, and frequently 
kills more than it can eat, crushing 
the skull of its prey and sucking its 
blood. A story is told of a weasel 
which was carried off by an eagle. 
When high up in the air, the wea¬ 
sel, after a sharp fight, succeeded in 
biting through the throat of the 
eagle, which fell to the ground in a 
dying state, when the weasel ran 
away unhurt. 

The weasel is a mammal of the 
order carnivora, or flesh-eating 
animals, and of the same family with 
the ERMINE, SABLE, FERRET, POLE¬ 
CAT, and SKUNK. 

The word weasel is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon wesle , weasel. 

WELL, a fountain or spring of 
water, which boils or bubbles up 
from the earth. Mineral springs are 
called wells in some places. But 
what we commonly call wells are 
pits sunk into the ground deep 
enough to reach water. When these 
are dug through rock or very hard 
earth, they are sometimes left un¬ 
lined, but they are usually walled up 
with brick or stone, or lined with a 
large cylinder or tube of earthen¬ 
ware or of iron. Wells are some¬ 
times dug several hundred feet deep 
before water is reached, and some¬ 
times water is found very near the 
surface of the ground. 

Artesian Wells, so named because 
first dug at Artois, the ancient Ar- 
tesium, France, are made by boring 
a hole in the ground and lining it 
with a metal tube. Some have been 
bored more than half a mile deep, 
though not more than six or eight 
inches wide. The boring is done 
by proper tools worked by machin¬ 
ery, and the metal tube is slipped 
down in pieces as fast as the hole 
is dug. In some Artesian wells the 
water comes up to the surface and 
flows from it in a steady stream, and 





WHALE 


645 


WHALE 


in others pumps have to be used. 
Water comes up in an Artesian well 
in just the same way that it rises 
and flows into the upper stories of a 
house through the pipes from a res¬ 
ervoir. The water which feeds the 
well has its source in some higher 
place, from which it is all the time 
running down into its underground 
reservoir. The reservoir thus be¬ 
comes full, and when the well is 
bored into it from above, the pres¬ 
sure from behind forces the water up 
the tube and causes it to flow like a 
spring. There are a great many Ar¬ 
tesian wells in the United States, 
the most important ones being in 
Charleston, Louisville, and St. 
Louis. The deepest one in the 
world is in Germany, about twenty- 
five miles from Berlin. It is nearly 
four fifths of a mile (4170 feet) deep. 

The Tube Well, sometimes called 
the American well, because it was 
first used in the United States, is a 
small iron tube, one or two inches 
wide, with a hollow steel point. 
When there is water a little way 
from the surface of the ground, this 
can easily be driven down to it. 
The water flows into the pipe 
through little holes in the end, and 
is raised up by a pump fastened to 
the top of the tube. In the West 
wells are sometimes bored with 
large earth augurs, an iron pipe 
being afterward put into the hole 
thus made. 

The word well is Anglo-Saxon, 
and is from wealn , to well or boil 
up. 

WHALE. Whales are shaped like 
fishes and are formed to live like 
fishes in the water. They were once 
classed among fishes and are still 
called fishes in common talk, but 
they are really mammals, for they 
are warm-blooded and air-breathing 
animals, bring forth their young 
alive, and suckle them for some time. 

The whale has no neck, and the 
head makes a third or a fourth of 
the whole body. The tail is shaped 
like that of a fish, but is flat side¬ 


ways instead of up and down, and 
is often twenty feet wide, or more 
than three times the height of a 
man. 

The whale has two flippers or fins, 
one on each side, which are chiefly 
for balancing the body in the water, 
the swimming being done mostly 
with the tail. The skin of the whale 
is naked and very thick, the inner 
part of it being mixed with fat. 
This fat is not under the skin, as in 
other fat animals, but is a part of 
the skin itself, and is called blubber. 
It is sometimes two feet thick, and 
taken altogether is very heavy; 
but, being lighter than water, helps 
to keep the whale afloat. It also 
keeps its blood warm in the cold 
waters of the Arctic seas, and aids it 
to bear the great pressure of the 
water when it goes down deep. 
Whales can stay under water half 
an hour, but they usually come to 
the surface every eight or ten min¬ 
utes to breathe. They stay up about 
two minutes, blow eight or nine 
times, throwing up a stream of 
water from their nostrils several 
yards high, and then go down again. 
There are two principal kinds of 
whales, the baleen (Latin balcena , a 
whale), or whalebone whale, which 
have no teeth, and the sperm whales, 
which have teeth in the lower jaw. 

Baleen Whales. There are two 
kinds of baleen whales, the Green¬ 
land or right whale, and the rorqual. 
The rorqual is called by whalemen 
razorback and finback, because it 
has a fin on its back. It is probably 
the largest of all animals, as it is 
sometimes more than a hundred feet 
long, or twice the height of a three- 
story house. It has less whalebone 
and blubber than the Greenland 
whale, and is not often attacked by 
whalemen. The Greenland whale 
grows to be sixty to seventy feet 
long. Instead of teeth the mouth is 
filled with plates of whalebone, set 
closely together, and fastened to the 
roof of the mouth. The edges of 
these plates form a kind of fringe, 





WHALE 


646 


WHALE 


as shown in the picture. When the 
whale feeds it swims along just 
under the surface of the water with 
its great mouth open, spouting out 
through its blow holes the water 
that goes into its mouth ; but all the 
small fish and little animals that go 
in with the water are caught in the 
whalebone fringes and swallowed. 


The throat is so very small that no 
fish larger than a herring can be 
swallowed. The baleen or Green¬ 
land whale is often killed by the 
grampus, a kind of dolphin, which 
bites it to death. 

The Sperm Whale is about as 
long as the Greenland whale, but it 
is more dangerous to attack because 



Mouth of Greenland Whale. 
a, Plates of Whalebone ; b, Bone of Lower Jaw. 


it will defend itself with both its 
teeth and its tail, either biting a 
boat in two or smashing it in pieces. 
The teeth, which are pointed like 
the one in the picture, are in the 
lower jaw. There are commonly 
twenty to twenty-five . of them of 
different sizes, some of them weigh- 


Tooth of Sperm Whale. 

ing as much as thirty pounds apiece. 
They are used for ivory, but are not 
so good as that from elephants’ 
tusks. It usually swims in shoals, 
and sometimes a whole shoal will 
come to the aid of one which has 
been harpooned, and will even at¬ 
tack a ship. It has an immense 



head, and in it is a large hollow 
filled with liquid spermaceti and oil. 
To get this a hole is cut in the top 
of the head, and the mixture taken 
out with buckets. The spermaceti, 
of which a common sized whale has 
about ten or twelve barrels, is sepa¬ 
rated from the oil by boiling. It is a 
solid white substance, which shines 
much like mother-of-pearl. 
It is used in making sperm 
candles, is put into pomatum, 
and also into “ cold cream ” used 
for softening the skin. The sperm 
whale has a thin blubber, but it 
yields a fine oil. In the bowels of 
this whale is often found a kind 
of waxy substance, which smells 
like musk. This is AMBERGRIS, 
which is used in perfumery. The 
sperm whale can stay under water 
longer than the Greenland whale. 
Its throat is also larger, and it can 
swallow anything as large as a man. 

The whale is one of the most use¬ 
ful of animals, but it is not so much 
sought after as it once was, because 














WHALE 


647 


WHALE 


the oils made from petroleum have 
mostly taken the place of whale oils, 
and vulcanized India-rubber and 
steel are much used instead of 
whalebone. To the Esquimaux and 
people of Greenland it is still of 
great importance: its oil is used 
for light, fuel, and food, and even its 
flesh, which we would think to be 
rather coarse, is eaten by them ; its 
baleen or whalebone and its other 
bones are used in making sledges, 
tents, boats, spears, and harpoons ; 
its sinews make twine and thread, 
and its thin membranes are used for 
window-glass. 

Whale Fishery. Ships fitted out for 


the whale fishery are usually not 
very large, but are built strongly to 
protect them from the ice, as whales 
are now found mostly in the Arctic 
seas about Greenland and Spitzber- 
gen. Each ship carries six or seven 
whale boats, sharp at both ends, so 
that they may be rowed backward 
or forward, and large enough for a 
crew of five to seven men. Each boat 
has in it two HARPOONS and five or 
six lances. In the bow of the boat is 
a tub with a long rope coiled up in 
it. One end of this rope is tied to a 
harpoon. When a whale is seen 
from the ship the boats are lowered 
into the water and have a race to 



Harpooning a Whale. 


see which shall get to the whale 
first. As soon as one of them comes 
near enough, the harpooner, who 
sits in the bow beside the tub, rises 
up, takes the harpoon in his right 
hand and the rope in his left, and 
casts the harpoon with all his 
strength into the whale’s body, at 
the same time shouting, 4 4 Stern all!” 
The boat’s crew at once back water 
with their oars, that is, they row 
backward, so as to get away from 
the whale, which, as soon as it feels 
the harpoon, generally dives down 
to a great depth, as shown in the 
picture, dragging the rope after it 
so fast that water has to be thrown 


on to the side of the boat to keep it 
from taking fire. In about twenty 
minutes it has to come up to blow ; 
the boats row up to it again, and a 
second harpoon is cast into it. It 
goes down again, striking the water 
with its tail, so that great care has 
to be taken to keep the boats from 
being crushed. When it comes up 
again it usually spouts blood, and it 
is then killed with lances. Some¬ 
times the whale dies at once when 
lanced, but sometimes it lashes the 
water into foam and dyes the sea 
with the blood which it spouts from 
its nostrils before it dies. 

The body of the whale is now 









WHALEBONE 


648 


WHEAT 


towed alongside the ship and fast¬ 
ened to the side with chains. Some 
of the crew then get on to the whale, 
having spikes in their boots so that 
they will not slip off, and cut into 
the blubber with sharp spades, tak¬ 
ing out great pieces, which are 
hoisted to the deck by hooks and 
chains. All the blubber is thus cut 
off, and after the whalebone has 
been taken from the mouth the rest 
is turned adrift, and the bears and 
fishes feed upon it. The blubber is 
then cut up into smaller pieces and 
heated in large boilers and strained. 
The oil is put into barrels, and the 
scraps that are left after straining 
are burned to heat other kettles. It 
is very dirty work, and the ship is 
made filthy with smoke, soot, and 
grease. 

The whale is a mammal of the 
order cetacea , and of a family in 
which is also the dolphin and the 
porpoise. 

The word whale is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon hwal , whale. 

WHALEBONE, a firm, horny sub¬ 
stance taken from the upper jaw of 
the Greenland or right whale. 
There are as many as three hun¬ 
dred plates of whalebone in the 
mouth of a full-grown whale. It is 
not properly bone, but is more like 
the horns of cattle. When softened 
by boiling, it can be cut up into bris¬ 
tles for brushes, stretchers for um¬ 
brellas and parasols, stiffeners for 
corsets and stays, the handles of 
whips, canes, and coverings for tel¬ 
escopes and opera glasses. Fine 
strips of it are also plaited into hats 
and bonnets and woven into hair¬ 
cloth. 

The word whalebone is made up 
of the Anglo-Saxon hwal , whale, 
and ban , bone. 

WHEAT, one of the cereal (see 
Corn) grains, belonging to the 
GRASS family. It is not known to 
grow wild anywhere, but is supposed 
to have first come from Asia. It 
has been cultivated and used for 
bread from the most ancient times 


and by almost all nations living in 
mild climates. There are a great 
many different 
kinds of wheat 
known, but only 
about a dozen kinds 
are grown in the 
United States. 

Spring wheat is 
sown in the spring 
and cut in the au¬ 
tumn of the same 
year ; winter wheat 
is sown in the au¬ 
tumn, generally in 
September, when it 
sprouts or bursts 
the seed, then 
lies all winter, 
comes up in the 
next spring and ri¬ 
pens, and is cut 
about the middle of 
summer. Some 
kinds of wheat have 
white grains and 
some red grains, 
and in some the 
heads are bearded, 
like that shown in 
the picture, while in 
others the heads are 
bald, or without 
beards. 

Wheat is the best of all the grains 
for food, as it has in it much starch 
and GLUTEN, and various mineral or 
earthy substances which are needed 
to keep the body healthy. It is used 
mostly as flour, but a good deal 
is eaten in the form of crushed or 
cracked wheat, or wheaten grits. 
This is simply wheat ground 
coarsely, and as it has in it all the 
parts of the grain (some of which are 
sifted out in making flour), it is very 
healthful. It should be boiled quite 
soft and eaten with milk (see Maca¬ 
roni). Wheat straw is largely used 
for plaiting for straw hats, and it 
is also valuable to chop up and mix 
with food for cattle. 

The word wheat is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon hwcete , the white, and the 
























WHIPPOORWILL 


649 


WIND 


grain is so named because it is 
whiter than rye and barley. 

WHIPPOORWILL. Whippoor¬ 
wills are seldom seen during the day. 
They usually fly in the evening, when 
the swallows have gone to rest; skim¬ 
ming along near the ground, without 
making any noise, seeking moths and 
other soft-bodied insects on which 
they feed. They have wide, gaping 
mouths with stiff bristles at the base 
of the bill, which keep insects from 
escaping when they are caught. The 
notes of the whippoorwill are’heard 
for several hours after sunset, and 
again between daybreak and sunrise. 
It lays two greenish-white eggs, 
spotted with blue and light brown. 
No nest is made, but the eggs are 
dropped on the ground, usually on 
fallen leaves. 

The whippoorwill belongs to the 
order insessores , or perching birds. 

The whippoorwill is so called 
from its notes, which sound like 
whip-poor-will. 

WHISKEY, a distilled liquor (see 
Alcohol) made mostly from grain. 
In the United States whiskey is made 
chiefly from rye and corn, but it is 
also made from barley, oats, and 
rice, and from potatoes and other 
roots. Whisky is used for drinking 
and for making into alcohol, almost 
all the alcohol used in the United 
States being got from it. 

The word whiskey is changed from 
usquebaugh , which is from the Cel¬ 
tic uisgebeatha , water of life, from 
uisge , water, and beatha , life. It is 
said to have been so called because 
its use in Ireland drove away the 
leprosy. 

WILLOW, a common tree of the 
same family with the poplar. Wil¬ 
lows are found in almost all coun¬ 
tries except Australia. The most 
common kind in the United States is 
the shining willow. The white wil¬ 
low is planted in Maryland and Del¬ 
aware to make CHARCOAL for gun¬ 
powder ; the wood is also good for 
fuel. In some countries willow bark 
is used for tanning leather and for 


making mats and fishing nets. The 
osier, used for making baskets, is a 
kind of willow. The weeping willow, 
which has long, hanging leaves, 
grew first in Asia and north Africa. 

The word willow is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon wili%, willow. 

WINCH, a bent handle or crank 
for turning awheel, a churn, a grind¬ 
stone, the windlass of a well, etc. 
The name is also sometimes given to 



Winch. 


the windlass itself, or the axle on 
which the rope is wound in drawing 
up buckets from a well or a mine. 

The word winch is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon wince , a reel for thread. 

WIND, moving air. The air is 
never entirely still, but is always 
moving somewhere. When any part 
of the earth’s surface becomes more 
heated by the sun’s rays than other 
parts, the air near it becomes thin¬ 
ner and rises into the higher layers 
of air until it comes to a layer of the 
same thickness with itself, when it 
mixes with it. As it goes up, a 
current of cooler air rushes in to 
take its place. Thus two currents of 
wind are made, one of warm air 
flowing out and the other of cool air 
flowing in. Damp air, too, which is 
lighter than dry air of the same 
heat, will make a like upward cur¬ 
rent. 

Along the sea-coast there is usually 
a breeze blowing from the sea during 
the daytime, and one from the land 
to the sea during the night. This is 
because the land is heated by the 
sun much quicker than the sea ; the 
warm air over the land moves upward 
and the fresh air from the sea rushes 
in to take its place. In the night it 







WIND 


650 


WIND 


is different ; the land gives off heat 
faster than the sea, and thus becomes 
cooler than it, and its heavier air 
flows outward over the sea. As the 
parts of the earth near the equator 
are much warmer than those north 
and south of them, the air over them 
is much lighter, and it is therefore al¬ 
ways rising and cooler currents from 
the cold regions of the north and the 
south are always moving in to take 
its place. Hence there are two upper 
warm currents of air always moving 
from the equator toward the poles, 
and two lower cool currents always 
moving from the poles toward the 
equator. If the earth stood still all 
the time, we should always have a 
wind blowing from the north in the 
northern hemisphere, and one blow¬ 
ing from the south in the southern 
hemisphere. But as the earth is all 
the while turning round from west 
to east very fast, each of them is 
made to slant toward the west, so 
that the wind from the north be¬ 
comes a north-east wind, and the 
one from the south a south-east 
wind. On some parts of the broad 
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans these 
winds, which, on account of their 
value to commerce, are called the 
trade-winds, have nothing in their 
path, and always blow in the same 
way ; but where they blow over the 
land their course is changed by many 
things. 

Sailors have more need to know 
about the winds than men on land, 
and they have to study them very 
carefully. They have names for all 
of them, calling them after the points 
from which they blow ; thus a wind 
blowing from north to south is called 
a north wind, and one from west to 
east a west wind. The winds blow¬ 
ing from the points between the 
north, the east, the south, and the 
west winds, are called the north-east, 
the south-east, the south-west, and 
the north-west winds. Sailors di¬ 
vide up the winds into thirty-two in 
all, according to the points of the 
compass. It is not usual to write 


out their names in full, but to give 
only their first letters: thus N.N.E. 
stand for north-north-east, or the 
wind which blows half way between 
north (N.) and north-east (N.E.) ; 
and W.S.W. stand for west-south¬ 
west, or the wind half way be¬ 
tween west (W.) and south-west 
S.W.). Sailors have also a way of 
marking the strength of the winds 
by naming them according to the 
speed with which they blow. When 
the wind does not blow at all, it is 
called a “calm ; ” when it blows two 
miles an hour, a “very light 
breezefour miles an hour, a 
“gentle breeze;” twelve miles an 
hour, a “ fresh wind twenty-five 
miles an hour, a “strong wind;” 
thirty-five miles an hour, a “ high 
wind;” forty-five miles an hour, 
a “gale;” sixty miles an hour, 
a “ strong gale ;” seventy-five miles 
an hour, a “violent gale;” nine¬ 
ty miles an hour, a “hurricane;’ 
and one hundred miles an hour, a 
“ violent hurricane.” The speed of 
the wind can be told by instruments 
which measure its strength, and in 
many cities an account of the blow¬ 
ing of the wind is kept every day, 
just as accounts of the heat and 
cold, as measured by the thermome¬ 
ter, are kept. Such a record of the 
speed and strength of the wind is 
kept in Central Park, New York. 

In most parts of the world there 
are winds which are known by spe¬ 
cial names. Thus, the hot wind 
which blows across north Africa 
from the desert is called the “ si¬ 
moom ;” the light winds of the In¬ 
dian Ocean are called “ monsoons ;” 
the great storms of the Pacific 
Ocean, “typhoons;” and the vio¬ 
lent storms in the Gulf of Guinea, 
“tornadoes.” The name tornado 
(from Spanish tornear , to turn) is 
given in the United States to the 
winds which rush in narrow paths 
over the country with whirling 
clouds and rain and hail, tearing to 
pieces every thing in their way. 
Great damage is often done to trees 






WINDLASS 


WINE 


651 


and buildings, and men and animals 
are frequently killed by them. 

The word wind is Anglo-Saxon. 

WINDLASS, a machine for raising 
weights, The most common kind 
is much used in wells for drawing 
up buckets of water. Such a wind¬ 
lass is made up of an axle around 
which the rope on which the bucket 
is hung is wound up, and a handle 
called the crank or winch by which 
it is turned. 

The ship windlass, used on small 
merchant vessels, instead of a cap¬ 
stan, is shown in the picture. It is 
turned round so as to wind up a 
rope or chain on its barrel by means 
of bars called hand spikes, which are 
made to fit into the square holes in 
it. The windlass is used on ships 



for raising the anchor, hoisting heavy 
sails, and pulling up other heavy 
things. It is fitted with strong pawls 
or ratchets to keep it from turn¬ 
ing backward when the handspikes 
are moved from one hole to another. 

The word windlass is probably 
from the Dutch windaas , windlass, 
from winden , to wind, and as, an 
axis. 

WINDMILL, a mill turned by wind. 
The common windmill is usually a 
tower with a round top, from which 
sticks out a shaft having at its end 
four arms on which canvas is 
stretched. The wind blows upon 
the canvas, or sails, and causes them 
to turn round, and as the shaft is 
connected by means of cogwheels, or 
wheels with teeth, with other wheels 


inside, the machinery of the mill is 
made to turn also. The sails will 
turn best when the wind blows 
straight against them, and as the 
wind sometimes comes from one 
way and sometimes from another, 
the round top or dome of the tower 
is so made that it can be turned 
round so as to bring the sails on the 
side of the wind. This was for¬ 
merly done by hand in all windmills, 
and it is still done in many old ones, 
but in most new mills the top is so 
made that the wind itself will turn 
it. Windmills are much used, es¬ 
pecially in places where there are 
no running streams to turn water¬ 
wheels, for grinding grain, for rais¬ 
ing water to the upper stories of 
houses, for draining land, and many 
other purposes. 

The word windwill is made up of 
the Anglo-Saxon words wind, wind, 
and mylen, mill. 

WINE, the fermented (see Beer) 
juice of grapes. The kind of wine 
depends not only on the kind of 
grape, but on the time when the 
grapes are picked, and on the way in 
which the wine is made. For mak¬ 
ing a lively wine, like champagne, 
the grapes are picked before they 
are quite ripe ; for a rich- flavored 
wine, like port, the grapes must be 
fully ripe ; and for sour wines, like 
Rhine wine, the picking is put off as 
late as possible. The grapes are 
gathered in baskets in the vineyards, 
usually by women and children, and 
emptied into the wme-press. This, 
which is a large tub with holes in 
the bottom, is set over a larger one, 
called the wine-vat. The grapes are 
crushed by men who get into the 
wine-press and tread them down 
with their naked feet. The juice 
runs through the holes in the bottom 
into the vat, and when this is nearly 
full it is left to ferment or work. 
This may take a few days or only a 
few hours, according to the heat of 
the air. When the juice, which is 
called the must, begins to ferment, 
little bubbles of CARBONIC ACID gas 


















WINE 


652 


WIRE 


rise up through it, caused by the 
turning of the sugar of the juice into 
alcohol. The must soon becomes 
muddy and warm, and froths much 
on the top, so as nearly to fill the 
vat, but after a time it settles and 
gets clear and cool. When cold it 
is racked—that is, it is drawn off 
from the vat, through a hole made a 
few inches above the bottom so as 
not to stir up the settlings, and put 
into casks. A second but slighter 
fermentation now takes place, and 
the cask is kept open until this 
stops, when it is closed and is ready 
for market. 

Wines have to be watched very 
carefully while fermenting, as on this 
depends their goodness. Some 
grape juice has much more sugar in 
it than others ; if the fermentation 
stops before all the sugar is turned 
into alcohol, the wine is much 
sweeter than if all the sugar has been 
fermented. Wines having much 
sugar in them are called “ sweet” 
wines, and those with but little 
sugar “ dry” wines. Malaga and 
Tokay are sweet wines, and Madei¬ 
ra, Sherry, and Port are dry wines ; 
but there are often both sweet and 
dry kinds of the same wine. Wines 
bottled while the fermentation is still 
going on will have carbonic acid gas 
in them. This gives them a brisk 
taste and causes them to foam when 
uncorked. Such wines are called 
” sparkling” wines. ” Still” wines 
are those which do not sparkle. 

As the juice of all grapes is color¬ 
less, all kinds of wine would be 
without color, or “white,” as they 
are called, if they were made from 
juice alone. But when the juice and 
the skins are fermented together for 
a time, the wine will have some 
color. Even the skins of white 
grapes will give wine a kind of am¬ 
ber color, while those of dark grapes 
make the rich tints seen in claret 
and port wines. When wines do 
not have color enough they are often 
colored with logwood, burnt sugar, 
and other things. 


The principal wine countries in 
Europe are Trance, Spain, Portugal, 
Germany, Italy, Hungary, Greece, 
and Turkey. From France comes 
Champagne, Burgundy, Medoc, 
Bordeaux, and many other wines. 
Malaga and Sherry (named from 
Xeres, near which it is made) are 
Spanish wines. Port wine comes 
from Oporto in Portugal. Rhine and 
Moselle wines come from Germany. 
Madeira wine is made in the island 
of Madeira, off the west coast of Af¬ 
rica, and Tokay in Hungary. 

Much wine is now made in the 
United States, chiefly in California, 
Ohio, New York, Missouri, Illinois, 
and Pennsylvania. Some American 
wines are much like those made in 
Europe, and some are wholly differ¬ 
ent. 

The word wine is from the Anglo- 
Saxon win , from the Latin vinum, 
wine. 

WINTERGREEN, the common 
name of a small evergreen plant 
which grows wild in the woods al¬ 
most all over the northern United 
States and Canada. Its leaves are 
dark shiny green above and light 
green beneath, its flowers are white, 
and it bears little scarlet berries, 
about as large as whortleberries. 
They are often called partridge ber¬ 
ries, because partridges and other 
birds live largely on them in winter, 
and sometimes also checkerberries, 
and squaw-berries. Both the leaves 
and the berries are good to'eat. Oil 
of wintergreen distilled (see Alco¬ 
hol) from the leaves is used for 
flavoring confectionery and for hid¬ 
ing the bad taste of medicines. 

Wintergreen is so called because 
its leaves are green all winter. 

WIRE, a thread of metal. The 
ease with which a metal may be 
drawn into wire is called its ductility. 
In ancient times wire was made by 
hammering out metal into thin 
sheets, cutting it up into strips, and 
then hammering and filing the strips 
into wire. Now the metal is first 
made into rods by being passed 




WOLF 


653 


WOLF 


when red-hot between grooved roll¬ 
ers and afterward made into wire 
by drawing them cold through holes 
in a plate of some harder metal. 
But cast-steel rods for needle wire 
are prepared with the hammer in¬ 
stead of being rolled. The draw 
plates are usually made of hardened 
steel and are full of holes of differ¬ 
ent sizes. The rods are drawn 
through these holes, one after an¬ 
other, until they are brought down 
to the size wanted. Much force is 
needed to do this, and strong ma¬ 
chinery is used for the purpose. 
Most wire is round, but some is 
made oval, some square, and some 
three-sided, for special uses. 

Iron wire has a great number of 
uses; it is made into ropes for 
ships, cables for bridges, gauze or 
network, fences, cages, sieves, 
screens for windows, etc. Steel 
wire is used for the strings of pianos 
and harps, and knitting and sewing 
needles ; gold and silver wire for 
filigree work ; and brass wire for 
pins, hooks and eyes, and many 
other purposes. 

The word wire is from the Anglo- 
Saxon wir , wire. 

WOLF. The wolf looks much 
like a large shaggy dog, and it has 
been thought by many that the first 
dogs sprung from wolves. When 
taken young the wolf may be tamed, 
and it shows as much love for its 
master as the dog does. The wolf is 
very swift, and hunts deer and other 
animals in packs. It is sly and 
stealthy, and often prowls about 
lonely farms, to catch stray sheep, 
calves, pigs, or fowls, but is also 
cowardly and is easily frightened off 
by the barking of a dog or the sound 
of a gun. But when pressed by 
hunger it becomes dangerous, and 
will attack horses and oxen, and 
even men. In hard winters packs of 
hungry wolves come down from 
the forests of the Alps and other 
mountains in Europe and commit 
great ravages ; and many terrible 
stories have been told of travellers 


who have been chased by them in 
great forests, especially in Russia 
and Siberia. In one case a man and 
his wife, who were riding in a sleigh 
through the woods, were so hard 
pressed by wolves that they saved 
themselves only by throwing out 
their children, one by one, to be de¬ 
voured by the hungry beasts. It is 
said that in Russia more than two 
hundred human beings are killed by 
wolves every year, and a great many 
thousands of cattle and sheep. 

The Gray Wolf of North America 
is usually gray above and yellowish- 
gray below, but is sometimes nearly 
white. It is three to four feet long, 
with a tail about a foot and a half 
long. Packs of these wolves follow 
the buffalo herds on the western 
plains, feeding on the sick and strag¬ 
gling ones. They also attack horses, 
and sometimes men, when very hun¬ 
gry. They were once plentiful in 
New England and the other Eastern 
States, but now only a few are found 
in mountainous and thickly wooded 
parts. 

In 1739 Israel Putnam, who after¬ 
ward became so well known as Gen¬ 
eral Putnam of the Revolutionary 
War, began life as a farmer in the 
town of Pomfret, Connecticut, forty 
miles east of Hartford. That part 
of the State was then quite wild, and 
the wolves were so troublesome that 
they killed seventy of his sheep in 
one night. The mischief was all 
done by one old she wolf and her 
cubs, who had lived in the woods 
near there for several years. The 
hunters killed the cubs, but the old 
one was too wary to be caught. 
She was at last driven by blood¬ 
hounds into a den about three miles 
from Putnam’s house. The hunters 
tried to smoke her out by burning 
straw and brimstone in the mouth 
of the cave, but the wolf would not 
come out, and Putnam, tired of wait¬ 
ing any longer, for it was then ten 
o’clock at night, took a blazing 
torch in his hand and went down 
the hole, which was only high 




WOODCHUCK 


654 


WOODPECKER 


enough for him to crawl on his 
hands and knees. He had a rope 
tied round his legs, and told his 
friends to pull him up when he gave 
a signal. He crawled along more 
than thirty feet, or six times a 
man’s length, without seeing any 
thing ; but all at once he saw at the 
end of the cave the glaring eyeballs 
of the wolf. She gnashed her teeth 
and gave a sudden growl, and his 
friends, who heard it, pulled him 
out so quickly that his shirt was 
torn to strips and his skin badly cut. 
He then loaded his gun with buck¬ 
shot, and taking it in one hand and 
a torch in the other, went down 
again. As soon as he came near 
the wolf, she growled and made 
ready to spring on him, but he shot 
her quickly in the head, and was 
hauled out again nearly deaf with 
the noise and choked with the 
smoke. After the smoke had cleared 
away, he crawled down a third 
time, took the dead wolf by the 
ears, and the two were pulled out by 
the people above with much joy. 

The Indians catch many gray 
wolves in traps, and also kill many 
by surrounding them in a circle 
which they make smaller, little by 
little, until they get near enough to 
shoot them. 

The Prairie Wolf, which the Mex¬ 
icans call coyote , is smaller than the 
gray wolf, and is much like the 
jackal. The true wolf has a howl 
like that of a dog, but the prairie 
wolf has only a kind of snapping 
bark, whence it is sometimes called 
the barking wolf. It lives in bur¬ 
rows on the great western plains, 
is very swift, and hunts in packs. 

The wolf is a mammal of the 
order carnivora , or flesh-eating ani¬ 
mals, and of the dog family. 

The word is from the Anglo- 
Saxon wnlf , wolf. 

WOODCHUCK, a small animal 
found almost all over the United 
States and Canada. It is somewhat 
larger than a rabbit, and is usually 
blackish-gray on the back and red¬ 


dish-brown below. It digs deep holes 
in the ground, with several parts and 
entrances, and so built that the water 
cannot run into them. Its food is 
chiefly plants, vegetables, and fruit, 
and it is often a great pest to the farm¬ 
er. Woodchucks are very cleanly in 
their habits, and make pretty pets 
when tamed. In the Southern States 
they are sometimes called ground 
hogs. 

The woodchuck is a mammal of 
the order rodentia , or gnawing ani¬ 
mals. 

WOODCOCK, a game bird about 
eleven inches long, with a long bill 
and a very short tail, and usually 
yellowish-brown and black shaded. 
It is a shy, timid bird, and hides it¬ 
self by day in the thickest woods, 
from which it comes out at even¬ 
ing to feed. It lives on insects, 
worms, and grubs, which it seeks 
in fresh-water swamps by thrust¬ 
ing its long bill into the mud. Its 
nest, built on the ground, is of 
dried leaves and grass, and it lays 
four or five yellowish eggs marked 
with brown. The woodcock is 
much hunted, as its flesh is greatly 
prized. As its flight is very swift 
and irregular, it is a hard bird to 
shoot. 

The woodcock belongs to the 
order grallatores, or wading BIRDS, 
and to the snipe family. 

The word woodcock is from the 
Anglo-Saxon wuducocc , from wudu , 
wood, and cocc, cock. 

WOODPECKER. Woodpeckers 
are found all over the world, except¬ 
ing in Australia. They are active, 
lively birds, and live chiefly in woods, 
where they bore into the bark and 
wood in search of insects and grubs, 
on which they chiefly feed. The bill 
is long, sharp, and stout, and the 
tongue, which is also long and sharp, 
has on it a kind of gum. The bird 
holds on to the bark of the tree with 
its claws, taps the tree with its bill 
until it finds a hollow place where it 
thinks a grub is hidden, and then 
goes to work to dig a hole with its 




WOOL 


655 


WOOL 


bill, making a loud thrumming, noise 
like a watchman’s rattle. When it 
reaches the grub, if it is a large one 
it runs its tongue through it and 
draws it out, but if small it catches 
it on the gummy end of its tongue. 
Woodpeckers lay four to six white 
eggs in nests in the holes of trees. 
There are several kinds of wood¬ 
peckers in the United States, among 
which the hairy, the red-headed, and 
the black are the most common. In 
California is one which lives chiefly 
on acorns, which it stores up in a 
very odd way. It picks the bark of 
a tree, generally a white oak or red¬ 
wood, full of holes of the size of an 
acorn. It then fits acorns into these 
holes by putting them in small end 
first and pounding them with its bill 
until they are wedged in tightly. 
The woodpecker belongs to the or¬ 
der scansores, or climbing birds. 

The word woodpecker is made 
from the Anglo-Saxon wudu , wood, 
and fiycan , to pick or peck. 

WOOL, a covering for the body, 
something like hair, growing on the 
skin of the sheep and of some other 
animals. Hair is usually straight 
and smooth, but wool is wavy. 



Wool Magnified. 


and when looked at under the MI¬ 
CROSCOPE is seen to be made up of 
little saw-like teeth or scales over¬ 
lapping each other and sticking out 
wherever it bends. These scales 
are shown in a , which is a thread of 
sheep’s wool magnified, and split 
through the middle so as to show the 
edges of the scales, and in b, which 
is the same left whole. Though these 
scales are so small that they cannot 
be seen with the naked eye (there 
are about 3000 of them in every inch 
of some wool), they are of the great¬ 
est importance, for without them 


wool could not be spun into thread 
to make cloth, and it would not 
felt. When spun, these scales fit 
into each other and hold fast so that 
the thread will not untwist ; but 
smooth hair will not keep its twist 
when spun. 

Most wool is got from the sheep, 
but the ALPACA, and the Cashmere, 
the Angora,and the Rocky Mountain 
GOAT also give wool, and the 
beaver and some other animals have 
wool under their hair. All sheep’s 
wool is not alike ; in some kinds the 
threads are much longer than in 
others, and some are fine while 
others are coarse. Wool is usually 
six to twelve inches long, but if 
sheep are not sheared it will grow 
very much longer, and at the same 
time coarser. When the fibre is 
short, wool is called “ short staple,” 
and when long, “ long staple.” 
Most wool is brought from Austra¬ 
lia, South Africa, and South Amer¬ 
ica, but a great deal is grown in Rus¬ 
sia, Germany, France, Spain, and 
Great Britain, and in the United 
States, chiefly in California and other 
Western States, and in Texas. 

Woollen Goods. When wool is 
taken to the factory to be made into 
cloth, it is first sorted, so as to put 
together threads of the same fineness, 
softness, strength, clearness, color, 
etc. The different packs are then 
scoured in lye to get the grease out, 
and afterward washed in clean water 
and dried. It is next dyed, unless 
it is to be made into some kinds of 
cloth which are not dyed until they 
are woven. The next process is 
willying, by which the dust is blown 
out of it, and it is then picked by 
hand, to get out burs, knots, and 
other large things which the willy 
machine does not blow out. After 
picking, the wool is spread over a 
floor, sprinkled with olive oil, and 
beaten with sticks. It then goes 
through the scribbling, carding, and 
stubbing machines, by which it is 
further cleaned and is made into a 
soft weak thread. This thread is then 





WOOL 


656 


WORMS 


spun by machines into a thread fine 
and firm enough for weaving (see 
Cloth). After the cloth is woven 
it is beaten with wooden mallets or 
hammers moved by machinery in a 
flat trough with soap and water, to 
get out the oil and dirt, and after¬ 
ward with clear water. If the wool 
has not been dyed before, the cloth 
is now dyed in the piece, washed 
again, and stretched upon frames in 
the open air to dry. It next goes 
through the fulling machine, by 
which the cloth is pounded or 
rolled in a thick mixture of soap and 
water, which causes the fibres of the 
wool to felt together so that the 
threads cannot be seen. By this 
the cloth is made to shrink about a 
half in width and a fourth in length, 
and to become much thicker. Aft er 
fulling the cloth is again scoured and 
then teaseled, by which the nap is 
made. This is done by passing the 
cloth over rollers set full of teasels. 
Teasels are the burs or flower heads 
of the teasel plant, which are cov¬ 
ered with stiff sharp prickles. These 
prickles catch in the wool and pull 
up enough of the little threads to 
make a rough surface all over the 
cloth, which when cut smooth makes 
the nap. As many as three thou¬ 
sand teasels are sometimes used in 
dressing one piece of cloth. The 
nap was formerly cut smooth with 
hand shears, but it is now done by 
machines made for the purpose. The 
finest kinds of cloth are teaseled 
and sheared several times. The 
cloth is then cleaned, brushed, and 
pressed, and folded and packed for 
sale. Among the chief kinds of 
woollen goods are broadcloths (so 
called because they are fifty-six to 
sixty inches wide), which include 
meltons, beavers, pilot cloths, cloak¬ 
ings, and others; narrow cloths 
(usually about twenty-seven inches 
wide), which include cassimeres or 
kerseymeres, doeskins, and tweeds ; 
and upholstery cloths, carriage 
cloths, flannels, blankets, and some 
kind of shawls. 


Worsted Goods (named from 
Worstead, in Norfolk, England, 
where they were first made) differ 
from woollen goods in being woven 
from a stronger and harder spun 
yarn. Yarn for woollen cloth is 
only slightly twisted, and the fibres 
are crossed in every way so as to 
leave them free for felting together 
when they are fulled ; but in yarn 
for worsted cloth the fibres of the 
wool are all laid as straight as pos¬ 
sible. Among worsted or stuff 
goods, as they are sometimes called, 
are merinoes, bombazines, serges, 
buntings, moreens, damasks, reps, 
camlets, poplins, cashmeres, Henri¬ 
etta cloths, and muslin-de-laines. 
Some are made of all wool, some 
of wool and cotton, some of wool 
and silk, and some of wool, silk, 
and cotton, or wool, silk, and linen. 

The word wool is from the Anglo- 
Saxon wull, wool. 

WORMS. The bodies of worms 
are generally long, slender, and 
round, though some are flat, and 
they have no skeletons. Worms have 
no feet, but are usually provided 
with bristles, hairs, or hooks, which 
aid them in crawling, and some 
which live in the water have fins for 
swimming. Most of them have 
mouths and eyes, and have also the 
senses of hearing and of touch. 

Worms are divided into two 
orders : I. Annelida, and II. Ento- 
zoa. 

I. Annelida, so called because 
they are made up of many rings, are 
divided into four families : 

1. Dorsibranchiata, or back-gilled, 
which breathe through little gills 
arranged along their backs. Some 
of these live in the sea, and both 
swim and crawl. In hot climates 
they grow sometimes to be four feet 
long. 

The word dorsibranchiata is from 
the Latin dorsum , back, and bran - 
chia , gill. 

2. Tubicola, or tube-dwellers, 
which live in shell tubes fastened 
to rocks, shells, etc., at the bottom 





WORMS 


657 


WORMS 


of the sea. In some of these the 
tube is formed of lime which comes 
out of the animal’s own body, but in 
others it is made of little pieces of 
shell and stone, and grains of sand 
which are put into place by the 
worm and then stuck together with 
a kind of gum from its mouth. 

The word tubicola is from the 
Latin tubus , tube, and colere , to 
dwell. 

3. Terricola, or earth-dwellers, so 
called because they live in the earth. 
There are many kinds, but they are 
all much like the common earth¬ 
worm, or angleworm, as it is some¬ 
times called. This has a sharp- 
pointed head, near the end of which 
is its mouth. It has no teeth and no 
eyes. Along the rings of its body are 
many short, rough bristles, which 
aid it in creeping or climbing in the 
ground. 

Earthworms live in moist earth, 
through which they wbrk their way, 
making long galleries and swallow¬ 
ing the earth as they go ; but we are 
not certain what they do this for. 
Some writers think they get all their 
food from the vegetable matter in it, 
but others believe that they do it 
only to get the earth out of the way 
in making their galleries. Earth 
passes through them just as food 
does through other animals ; the 
little heaps of fine grained earth often 
seen on the surface of the ground 
are earth thrown out by them. 
These worm-casts, as they are called, 
sometimes gain so fast as to form a 
layer of fine soil, and many old pas¬ 
tures owe their richness to them. 
By throwing up these little heaps 
and by boring through and loosen¬ 
ing the soil so that the rain can get 
into it and the fibres of plants can 
work their way through it; earth¬ 
worms are of very great use to man¬ 
kind. They also furnish food for 
many birds and fishes, and for small 
mammals and reptiles, such as 
moles and frogs. 

Earthworms seldom come to the 
surface of the ground, except at 


night and in wet weather. In times 
of drought and in cold weather they 
go deep down into the earth. Their 
eggs usually have one, but some¬ 
times two, young ones in them, 
which escape out of a kind of valve 
at the end. 

The word terricola is from the 
Latin terra , earth, and colere , to 
dwell. 

4. Suctoria, or suckers, so called 
because they have suckers at each 
end of the body, by fastening 
which, one at a time, to the ground, 
and drawing the body up like a loop, 
they are enabled to move quite rap¬ 
idly. They can also swim very well 
by moving the body from side to 
side. The principal worm of this 
order is the leech, of which there are 
many kinds. They live in fresh 
water, where they feed on earth¬ 
worms and small water animals, but 
often fasten themselves to large ani¬ 
mals and suck their blood. One kind 
is much used in medicine for draw¬ 
ing blood, which they do without 
pain. They fasten themselves to 
the skin by the front sucker, in 
which is the mouth, pierce it with 
their three sharp teeth, and suck un¬ 
til they are full, when they let go. 
The best leeches are brought from 
the south of Europe. 

The word suctoria is from the 
Latin sugere, to suck. 

II. E ntozoa, so called because they 
are fitted to live within the bodies of 
other animals. There are many 
kinds of these, some of which are 
found in man, some in dogs, horses, 
and other animals, some in com¬ 
mon fowls, and other birds. The 
worms commonly called tape 
worms, and hair worms, which 
look like a long horse hair, belong 
to this class;. 

Worms are the lowest class of ar¬ 
ticulate ANIMALS. 

The word worm is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon wurrn or wyrm . Anne¬ 
lida is from the Latin annulus, a 
ring; entozoa is from the Greek 
entos, within, and zoon, animal. 





WREN 


658 


WRITING 


WREN. The common European 
wren, or kitty wren as it is usually 
called, is a lively little bird, reddish- 
brown above and yellowish below. 
It builds its nest in holes of walls 
and roofs or between the branches 
of trees, and lays eight or ten eggs. 
In France the wren is called roitelet , 
little king, and sometimes ponlette 
au bon Dieu, God’s little hen. To 
kill it or to rob its nest is looked 
upon with horror. It is the same in 
Scotland, where an old verse thus 
calls down curses on him who robs 
the wren’s nest: 

“ Malisons, malisons, mair than ten. 

That harry the Ladye of Heaven’s hen !” 

The House Wren of the United 
States is much like the kitty wren, 
but is a little larger, more familiar, 
and a sweeter singer. It loves to 
build its nest near dwellings, espe¬ 
cially in the little boxes and bird 
houses often put up for it, and will 
defend its home with great valor 
against other birds, and even cats. 
It lays five or six pale red eggs, and 
raises two broods each season. 

The little wren is a very motherly 
bird, and has been known to take 
care of the young of other birds. A 
pair of robins, which had built their 
nest and hatched out four little rob¬ 
ins in a tall tree near a country 
house, were found dead on the 
ground under the tree. The people 
in the house could see the four little 
heads of the orphans peeping over 
the edge of the nest, and could hear 
them crying for food, but could not 
help them, the nest was so high. 
While they were trying to see what 
could be done, they saw a wren 
light on the edge of the nest. After 
staying just long enough to find out 
what the trouble was, it flew away, 
but soon came back with food in its 
mouth for the robins ; and it fed 
them thus every day until the little 
ones were able to leave the nest. 

The wren belongs to the order zn- 
sessores, or perching BIRDS. 

The word wren comes from the 
Anglo-Saxon wrenna , wren. 


WRENCH, an iron tool for turning 
bolts, nuts, etc. Some wrenches 
are like a plain bar with a jaw at 
one end, made to fit a common sized 
nut (see Bolt), and some, like the 



Common Wrench. 


one in the picture, are made with a 
jaw at one end and an opening at 
the other to turn nuts and bolts with 
six-sided heads. In the second pic¬ 
ture is shown a kind of wrench 
which may be made larger or 
smaller, so as to fit any sized nut. 
This is done by turning round the 



Monkey Wrench. 


piece at the bottom of the screw, 
which moves the lower jaw and thus 
makes the space between the two 
jaws wider or narrower as wished. 
This kind of wrench is commonly 
called a monkey-wrench. 

The word wrench is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon wrence , wrench. 

WRITING. In the article Alpha¬ 
bet is told that the letters of the 
English alphabet came to us through 
the Romans, Greeks, and Phoeni¬ 
cians from the Egyptians. The Egyp¬ 
tians said that Thoth, one of their 
gods, taught them how to write, but 
it is probable that the art grew up 
little by little. Writing was at first 
only pictures of things ; for exam¬ 
ple, instead of writing out the letters 
which spell man, tree, house, etc., 
small pictures of those things were 
drawn. As it took a good deal of 
time and trouble to draw a picture 
of each thing, soon only a part of 
each was made to stand for the 
whole thing, or a few rude lines were 
drawn instead of the full picture ; 





WRITING 


659 


WRITING 


thus, a hand would be understood to 
mean a man, a straight line drawn 
up and down a tree, and three 
straight lines, two up and down and 
one across the top, a house. In time 
these rude drawings became sym¬ 
bols—that is, they came to mean 
something besides the things they 
were first drawn for: the man’s 
hand was understood to mean 
strength, the upright line height, 
etc. Another change came after a 
while, and some of the symbols or 
signs grew to mean sounds or sylla¬ 
bles, and two or three of them were 
joined together to stand for one 
word. A still greater change came 
when some of them became let¬ 
ters. The Egyptians used some sym¬ 
bols and some letters in their writ¬ 
ing, and never entirely separated the 
two kinds; but the Phoenicians, 
when they learned how to write from 
the Egyptians, gave up the symbols 
and made the letters into an alpha¬ 
bet, and thus were really the first to 
write with letters alone. They 
changed the shape of some of the 
letters so as to make them more sim¬ 
ple, and also changed their names, 
calling them after such things as they 
thought they looked like : thus, the 
letter A (which in the Phoenician al¬ 
phabet is turned upside down, as &) 
was thought to look like an ox’s 
head, and so they named it aleph , 
ox, which in Greek became alpha . 

The Greeks took the Phoenician 
alphabet, and added a few more 


letters to it to stand for some sounds • 
in their language which the Phoeni¬ 
cians did not have in theirs. The Ro¬ 
mans made their alphabet from the 
Greek, and from the Romans it came 
to us with various changes. All Eu¬ 
ropean nations now write from the 
left side of the paper to the right, and 
all our books are printed in this 
way ; but writing has not always 
been done so. The Phoenicians wrote 
from right to left, and the Greeks at 
first wrote in the same way ; then 
they wrote one line from right to 
left and the next from left to right, 
and so on ; but as this was not very 
convenient, they finally changed, and 
always wrote from left to right. The 
Chinese and Japanese write in col¬ 
umns, up and down, beginning at 
the top at the right and going 
toward the left. The writing of 
the Chinese and Japanese is wholly 
different from that of other nations, 
and did not come from the Phoeni¬ 
cians, but was made by the Chinese. 
It is made up of many thousand 
characters, which stand for whole 
words and for syllables instead of for 
letters. It is very hard to learn, and 
very few even of the Chinese them¬ 
selves know all the characters. The 
Japanese have made some changes 
in them. The various things used 
in writing are told about in the arti¬ 
cles Book, Ink, Paper, Parch¬ 
ment, Pen, and Pencil. 

The word writing is from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon writan , to write. 





Y 


YAM, a vegetable much like the 
sweet potato, but larger, some yams 
weighing thirty or forty pounds 
apiece. There are many kinds, all 
of which grow in hot countries. 
The roots are coarser and not so 
good as those of the sweet potato, 
but are much eaten, either roasted 
or boiled, in Africa, China, Japan, 
South America, and the West Indies. 

The word yam is from ihame , the 
West Indian name of the plant. 

YEAST, the froth which rises on 
the top of beer and other liquors 
when they ferment. When looked 
at under the microscope, yeast is 
seen to be made up of little cells of 
plants called yeast-plants, which are 
a kind of fungi. It is yeast which 
makes drinks ferment and thus 
turns the sugar in them into AL¬ 
COHOL. Sugar will not turn into al¬ 
cohol of itself; it needs yeast to force 
it to change. Yeast is put into beer 
for this purpose, but not into cider 
and wine, because the juices of 
grapes, apples, and other fruits have 
some gluten in them which be¬ 
comes yeast and acts on their sugar 
just as common yeast does. When 
yeast is put into bread it makes a 
ferment in it in just the same way 
as in liquors. It turns the sugar in 
the dough into alcohol and carbonic 
acid gas ; the alcohol goes off in 
steam, and the gas swells up the 
bread and thus causes it to rise. 

The word yeast is from the Anglo- 
Saxon gist, yeast. 

YELLOW BIRD. This bird is 
sometimes called the American 
goldfinch and the thistle bird. It is 


found all over North America, is very 
hardy, and often stays all winter in 
the Middle States. The male is 
bright yellow, with black tail and 
wings marked with white, and with 
black on top of the head ; the fe¬ 
male is yellowish-brown above and 
darker brown below. Yellow birds 
are usually seen in flocks, feeding 
on the seeds of thistles, sunflowers, 
and other plants. They are beauti¬ 
ful and sprightly little birds, and 
their song is very pleasing. They are 
often caught and kept in cages, 
being easily tamed, and they make 
as pretty pets as canaries. By hard 
training they are sometimes taught 
many pretty tricks. There was once 
one which would draw water, when 
it wanted a drink, from a little well 
in the bottom of its cage. The bird 
would draw up the chain which was 
fastened to the bucket by pulling it up 
in its bill as far as it could reach, 
then putting his foot on it would 
reach lower down and pull up a lit¬ 
tle more, until at last the bucket 
would be brought near enough to 
drink. It drew up its seeds, which 
were kept in a little wagon, in the 
same way. Yellow birds build 
nests in trees or bushes out of lich¬ 
ens, which they stick together with 
a fluid from their mouths, and lay 
four to six bluish-white eggs, specked 
at the larger end with brown. They 
raise only one brood each season. 

The yellow bird belongs to the 
Oder insessores, or perching BIRDS, 
and to the finch family. 

The yellow bird gets its name from 
its color. 


660 



z 


ZEBRA. This animal is shaped 
more like the ass than like the horse, 
and has a tail with a bushy tuft at 
the end and a mane that stands 
straight up. Its chief beauty is its 
skin, which is usually of a creamy- 
yellow color striped all over with 
rich velvety black bands. The zebra 
is found in South Africa, especially 
in the mountainous parts near the 
Cape of Good Hope. It is very 
strong, swift, and sure-footed, and 
can bound up hills and over rocks as 
nimbly as a goat. If it could be 
tamed, it would be a valuable animal, 
but it is hard to break its wild spirit. 
A few have been used in South Africa 
to carry burdens, and several have 
been trained in menageries. The 
Hottentots often hunt zebras, as they 
think their flesh a great delicacy, but 
white people find it rather coarse. 
White hunters try to catch them 
alive and sell them to menageries 
for exhibition. Zebras commonly 
live in herds, and when feeding on 
the hillsides one of their number al¬ 
ways keeps watch as a sentinel. 
When attacked by men or other ani¬ 
mals they form in a circle with their 
heads inward, and defend themselves 
by kicking. 

The zebra is a MAMMAL of the 
order pachydermata , or thick- 
skinned animals, and of the horse 
family. 

The word zebra is Spanish. 

ZINC, a metal, and one of the 
principal ELEMENTS. It is not found 


as a metal, but in ores united with 
some of the other elements, such as 
oxygen or sulphur. The chief ore 
is a compound of zinc and sulphur 
(zinc sulphide) called blende. When 
ure, zinc is a bluish-white metal, 
ard and brittle at common heat, 
but when heated hot may be ham¬ 
mered or rolled out into thin sheets. 
It discolors and rusts a little in 
moist air, but the thin film or crust 
of rust sticks closely to it and keeps 
the part under it from further 
change. On this account zinc is very 
useful for making bath tubs, water 
spouts, pipes, tanks, roof covers, 
and many other things likely to be 
wet. Sheet iron, iron wire, and iron 
cables are also often covered with a 
coat of it to keep them from rusting. 
Iron thus coated is commonly 
called “galvanized iron,” but this 
is wrong, as the zinc is put on, not 
by galvanism (see Electricity), 
but in the same way that tin is put 
on to iron plates in making sheet 
tin. Zinc forms several valuable 
alloys, among which the most use¬ 
ful are BRASS, BRONZE, and Ger¬ 
man silver. 

Among the compounds of zinc are 
the paint called zinc white (zinc 
oxide), made up of zinc and oxy¬ 
gen ; and white vitriol (zinc sul¬ 
phate), made up of zinc, sulphur, 
and oxygen, which is used in medi¬ 
cine and the arts. 

The word zinc is zink in German, 
Swedish, and Danish. 


661 








INDEX 


ABDOMEN, Human, 382. 
Abele, 480. 

Absorption, Perfumes Made 

by, 454 - 
Acanthus, 147. 

Acephalous Mollusks, 398. 
Acetic Acid, 1. 

Acid, 1. 

Acid, Gallic, 265. 

Acid, Lactic, 395. 

Acid, Nitric, 421. 

Acid, Sulphuric, 600. 

Acid, Tannic, 349. 

Aeon, Mud-Boat, 414. 
Acorn, 2. 

Action, Pianoforte, 462. 
Adam and Eve’s Dog and 
Cat, 117. 

Adams’s Revolver, 469. 
Adits, 139. 

Adobe Bricks, 138. 

Adze, 2. 

Eolian Harp, 2. 

Aerated Bread, 87. 
.Esophagus, Human, 383. 
African Elephant, 216. 
African Lion 4 360. 

Agate, 3. 

Agates, Playing, 387. 
Agave, 3. 

Aguardiente, 480. 

Air, 4. 

Air, Amount Needed for 
Breathing, 371. 

Air Bladder in Fishes, 238. 
Air Cells of Lungs, 370. 

Air Changed in Lungs, 370. 
Air, Cold and Warm Layers 
of, 289. 

Air, Currents of, 649, 650. 
Air, Heat of the, 299. 

Air, Moist Lighter than Dry, 
45 - 

Air, Need of Pure, 370. 

Air, Nitrogen in the, 421, 
Air, Pressure of the, 5. 

Air Pump, 6. 

Aisle, Church, 130. 

Akene, 261. 

Alabaster, 7. 

Albatross, 285. 

Albino, 7. 


Albumen, 7, 252, 543. 
Albuminoids, 252. 

Alcohol, 7. 

Alcohol Thermometer, 615. 
Alder, 9. 

Alderney Cattle, 121. 

Ale, 58. 

Aleph, Letter, 659. 
Alexander the Great brings 
Peacocks from India, 447. 
Alhambra, Arabesques of, 
28. 

Alimentary Canal, 384. 
Alkali, 1, 9. 

Alleys, China, 387. 
Alligator, 9. 

Alligators, Eggs of, 205. 
Alloy, 10, 12, 23. 

Alloy for Bells, 61. 

Alloy, Brass, 86. 

Alloys of Copper, 149. 
Alloys of Gold, 277. 

Alloys of Lead, 348. 

Alloys of Nickel, 421. 

Alloys of Platinum, 478. 
Alloys of Tin, 618. 

A loys of Zinc, 661. 

Allspice, 10. 

Almanac, 10. 

Almond, 10. 

Aloe, American, 4. 

Aloes, 11. 

Alpaca, 11. 

Alpha, Letter, 659. 
Alphabet, 11, 659. 

Alphabet, Morse Tele¬ 
graph, 610. 

Alum, 12. 

Alumina, 12. 

Aluminum, 12. 

Amalgam, 10, 12, 210, 390. 
Amalgam, Silver, 563. 
Amalgamation, 12, 277. 
Amber, 13. 

Amber, Electricity in, 208. 
Ambergris, 13. 646. 
Ambrotype, 460. 

American Crane, 158. 
American Elk, 169, 
American Lion, 156. 
American Ostrich, 434. 
American Race, 381. 


Amethyst, 14. 

Ammonia, 14. 

Amphibians, 14. 

Amphibians, Eggs of, 205. 

Anaconda, 571. 

Anchor, 14. 

Anchor Ice, 319. 

Anchovy, 15. 

Andalusian Horse, 311. 

Androclus and the Lion, 

360. 

Anecdotes and Illustrations : 

Acanthus, Callimachus 
and the, 147. 

Androclus and the Lion, 
360. 

Anthony’s Ship at Ac- 
tium, 240. 

Ants, War-Making, 20. 

Arab and his Mare, 310. 

Baby Smothered, 370. 

Balloons and Balloonists, 
37 - 

Bandicoot.and Fire, 233. 

Barry, The Dog, 573. 

Bear and the Log, 52, 

Bear, A Shrewd, 51. 

Bishop and the Kraken, 
401. 

Bloodhound and Prisoner, 
180. 

Bottger and the Hair 
Powder, 487. 

Boy and Gold Leaf, 565. 

Burglars and Bank-Lock, 

366. 

Calcutta, Black Hole of, 
371 - 

Canary Birds, 102. 

Captain and the Bull- 
Dog, 178. 

Carrier Pigeons, Stories 
of, 464. 

Cat and Bird’s Nest, 118. 

Cat, A Fishing, 117. 

Clocks, Wonderful, 136. 

Coffee Plant, Captain 
Desclieux’s, 144. 

Cradle of Noss, 205. 

Cranes of Ibycus, 158. 

Crows, Singular Way of 
Killing, 161. 





CROWS 


664 


BAKER 


Crows, Tame, 161. 

Cuttle Fish and the 

Officer, 164. 

Days, The Thirteen 

Drifty, 572. 

Diamond, Orloff, 172. 

Dog and Cat, Adam and 
Eve’s, 117. 

Dogs, Stories of, 178. 

Dolls, Japanese Feast of, 
186. 

Eagle and Babies, 194. 

Eagle and Weasel, 644. 

Elephant Hunters, Arab, 
217. 

Falcons and Gazelle, 225. 

Fleas, The Learned, 245. 

Fox and Eggs, 258. 

Foxes and Hares, 257. 

Fox and Swan, 603. 

Gander and Old Woman, 
280. 

Ginevra and the Chest, 
371 - 

Herrings, King of Nor¬ 
way and the, 301. 

Hippopotamus, Baby, 
302. 

Ice Palace, 320. 

Kite, Franklin and his, 
337. 

Lioness and Terrier, 360. 

Lions, 360. 

Monkeys and Brazil Nuts, 

86 . 

Monkeys, Stories of, 404. 

Muskrats, Hunting, 413. 

Ostriches, 434. 

Owl, Genghis Khan and 
the, 436. 

Panther, A Tame, 440. 

Parrots, Stories of, 444. 

Pearls, Cleopatra’s, 450. 

Pelican, 451. 

Poodle and Boots, 184. 

Prescott’s Eye, 224. 

Rats, Stories of, 507. 

Rory and the Lap-Dog, 
183. 

Seals and Dog, 541. 

Shark, Man-Eater, 548. 

Snow, 573. 

Sun Goddess and Mirror, 
396 . 

Terrier and Newfound¬ 
land Dog, 183. 

Tigers, Stories of, 616. 

Wasps, Monkeys and, 
404 - 

Wolf, Putnam and the, 

653 - 

Wren and Robins, 658. 

Anemones, Sea, 27. 

Angel Fish, Japanese, 239. 

Angler Fish, 240. 

Angleworm, 657. 

Angora Cat, 117. 


Angora Goat, 276. 

Aniline, 267. 

Aniline Colors, 193. 
Animal, 15. 

Animal Charcoal, 80. 
Animalcule, 17. 

Animal Heat, 298. 

Animal Kingdom, 215. 
Animals, Coral, 150. 
Animals, Fur-Bearing, 264. 
Animals, Noises of, 576. 
Anise Seed, 18. 

Ankle, Bones of, 385. 
Annealing Glass, 84, 271. 
Annelida, 656. 

Annotto, 18. 

Annual Plants, 471. 

Ant, 18. 

Ant-Eater, 22, 379. 

Ant Hills, 22. 

Antelope, 22, 380. 

Antelope, Hunted with Fal¬ 
cons, 225. 

Antennae, 324, 326. 

Anther of Flowers, 248. 
Anthracite Coal, 139. 
Antimony, 23. 

Antimony, Powder of, 9. 
Antlers, Deer, 168. 

Antwerp Lace, 341. 

Anvil, 23. 

Aorta, 75. 

Ape, 24, 377. 

Apple, 24. 

Apple Brandy, 86. 

Apple Fruits, 261. 

Apples of Sodom, 265. 
Apricot, 25. 

Aprons, Sea, 542. 

Apse of Church, 131. 

Aqua Fortis, 421. 

Aqua Regia, 1, 278, 421. 
Aquamarine, 218. 
Aquarium, 25. 

Aquatint Engraving, 221. 
Aqueduct, 27, 88, 101. 

Arab Cheese, 125. 

Arab Elephant Hunters, 
217. 

Arab Way of Climbing 
Date Trees, 167. 
Arabesque, 27. 

Arabian Horse, 310. 

Arabic, Gum, 286. 
Arachnida, 580. 

Arbalast, 85. 

Arbor of Wheel, 139. 

Arch, 28. 

Archer Fish, 240. 

Archers, English, 84. 
Archil, x, 352. 

Architecture, Orders of, 14. 
Architrave, 146. 

Arctic Bear, 51. 

Arctic Birds, 63. 

Arctic Fox, 258. 

Argand Burner, 267, 343. 


Argonaut, 402. 

Arm, Muscles of, 411. 
Armature of Magnet, 374. 
Armenian Rat, 222. 

Armor, Diving, 176. 
Armory, Colt, 469. 

Arms, Human, 384. 

Army, Officers of, 557. 
Army, Shoulder Straps of, 
558. 

Arquebus, 512. 

Arrack, 511. 

Arrows, 84. 

Arrowroot, 28. 

Arsenic, 29. 

Arterial Blood, 76. 

Arteries, 74. 

Artesian Wells, 641, 644. 
Artichoke, 29. 

Articulates, 16. 

Artificial Ice, 320. 
Asafoetida, 29. 

Asbestus, 306. 

Ash, Bone, 80. 

Ash Tree, 29. 

Ashes, 29, 481. 

Ashes from Volcanoes, 30. 
Ashlar Masonry, 314. 

Asian Elephant, 216. 
Asparagus, 30. 

Asphalt, 30, 71. 

Asphalt Pavement, 446. 
Asphaltum, 30. 

Ass, 30, 307, 379. 

Asteroids, 629. 

Astronomical Telescope, 612 
Atmosphere, 200. 

Attar of Rose, 521. 

Auction, 30. 

Auger, 31. 

Auricles of Heart, 74. 
Aurora Borealis, 32. 

Awl, 31. 

Axe, 32. 

Axes, Ancient Bronze, 33. 
Axil, Leaf, 475. 

Axis of the Earth, 197, 199. 
Axminster Carpets, 111. 
Aylesbury Duck, 192. 
Ayrshire Cattle, 121. 

Azure Blue, 140. 

BABOON, 35, 377. 
Babylon, Bitumen Springs 
near, 71. 

Babylon, Walls of, 88. 
Babylonian Cement, 122. 
Baccalaureate, Title of, 346. 
Bachelor of Arts, 346. 
Backing in Masonry, 314. 
Backbone, Human, 382. 
Backbone of Snakes, 568. 
Bacon, 35. 

Badger, 35, 378. 

Bagpipe, 35. 

Baize, 36. 

Baker, Sir Samuel, 217, 296 






BAKER’S BREAD 


665 


BLOCK TIN 


Baker's Bread, 87. 

Balance, 533, 536. 

Balance, Letter, 535. 
Balance, Watch, 639. 
Balancers, Insects’, 324. 
Bald Eagle, 194. 

Baleen Whale, 380, 645. 
Bales, Cotton, 155. 

Ballast, Railroad, 502. 
Balloon, 36. 

Ball Valve, 632. 

Balm of Gilead, 232, 480, 
624. 

Balsam, Canada, 624. 
Balsam Fir, 232. 

Balsam Poplar, 480. 
Baltimore Bird, 37, 70. 
Baluster, 38. 

Balustrade, 38. 

Bamboo, 38. 

Bamboo Pickles, 38. 
Banana, 38. 

Band, Musical, 429. 
Bandana, 39. 

Bandicoot and Fire Brand, 
The, 233. 

Bandoline, 498. 

Banister, 38. 

Banjo, 39. 

Bank, 39. 

Bank Cod, 142. 

Bankers, 40. 

Bantam Fowls, 255. 

Barb, 311. 

Barbary Horse, 311. 
Barberry, 43. 

Bar Bit, 292. 

Bar of Horse’s Mouth, 308. 
Bar Magnet, 374. 

Bar Shot, 556. 

Bar Soap, Yellow, 573. 
Barge, 522. 

Barilla, 574. 

Barium, 43. 

Bark, Tan, 349. 

Bark of Trees, 43. 

Bark, Vessel, 552. 
Barkantine, 552. 

Barking Wolf, 654, 

Barley, 44. 

Barley Bread, 87. 

Barn Owl, 436. 

Barn Swallow, 602. 
Barnacle Goose, 280. 
Barometer, 44, 45. 
Barouche, 114. 

Barred Owl, 436. 

Barrel, 46. 

Bartlett Pear, 448. 

Baryta, 43. 

Basalt, 46. 

Base, in Chemistry, 46. 
Base of Column, 146. 
Basilica, 130. 

Basin for Vessels, 176. 
Basket, 47. 

Basket Wagon, 113. 


Bass, 48. 

Bass Drum, 191. 

Bassoon, 48. 

Basswood, 358. 

Bast, 359, 388. 

Bast Tree, 358. 

Bat, 48, 377. 

Batch, Glass, 270. 

Bath, 49. 

Bath tor Electro Plating, 
393. 

Batten of Loom, 369. 
Battens in House, 315. 
Battering Shell, 556. 
Battery, Electrical, 213. 
Bayberry, 346. 

Bayberry Tallow, 644. 

Bay Leaves, 346. 

Bay Lynx, 371. 

Bay Rum, 415. 

Bayonet, 50. 

Beach Plum, 479, 

Beads, 50. 

Beam of Light Divided, 355 
Beam, Weighers’, 534. 
Bean, 51. 

Bean, Seed of, 543. 

. Bear, 51. 

Bears, 378. 

Beaver, 52, 379. 

Beaver Cloth, 656. 

Bed, 54. 

Bed Bug, 54. 

Beds, Oyster, 438. 

Bee, 54. 

Bee Line, Origin of, 55. 
Beech, 57. 

Beef, 57. 

Beer, 58, 305. 

Beeswax, 643. 

Beet, 59. 

Beet Sugar, 59, 599. 

Beetle, 59. 

Beetle, Lightning Spring, 
235 - 

Beetles, Eggs of, 207. 
Belgian Pavement, 446. 

Bell. 60. 

Bell, Diving, 176. 

Bell Metal, 89. 

Bell Telephone, 612. 
Bellows, 62. 

Bellows, Organ, 430. 

Belly, Human, 382. 

Belted Kingfisher, 335. 
Bengal Lights, 238. 

Benzine, 456. 

Benzole, 267. 

Berdan Rifle, 514. 
Bergamot, 62. 

Berg-Mehl, 247. 

Bermuda Potatoes, 483. 
Bernard, Saint, Dogs of, 
573 - „ 

Bernard, Samt, Monastery 
of, 179. 

Berry, 261. 


Bessemer Steel, 591. 
Bicarbonate of Soda, 574. 
Biceps Muscle, 411. 

Bicycle, 633. 

Biennial Plants, 471. 

Bight in Rope, 339. 
Bilberry, 316. 

Bill Hook, 539. 

Bimana, 377. 

Binding Books, 82. 
Binnacle, 148. 

Birch, 62. 

Bird Fly, 409. 

Birds, 62. 

Birds’ Eggs, 203. 

Birds’ Nests, 67. 

Biscuit Ware, 485. 

Bison, 91, 380. 

Bistre, 439. 

Bit, 292. 

Bit, Auger, 31. 

Bitter Orange, 429. 

Bittern, Green, 300. 
Bitumen, 71. 

Bituminous Coal, 139. 
Bivalve, 398. 

Bivalve Shells, 549. 

Black Bass, 48. 

Black Bear, 52. 

Black-Cap, 126. 

Black Chalk, 123. 

Black Eye, A, 224. 

Black Frost, 260. 

Black Hole of Calcutta, 371. 
Black Lead, 72. 

Black Lead and Electro 
Plating, 394. 

Black Pepper, 454. 

Black Sea, Name of, 201. 
Black Spanish Fowls, 255. 
Black Swan, 603. 

Black and Tan Terrier, 
183. 

Black Tea, 607. 

Black Walnut, 638. 
Blackberry, 71. 

Blackbird, 72. 

Blackboards, Slate, 566. 
Blackcap Raspberry, 506. 
Blackfish, 72. 

'Blacking, 72. 

Blacksmith’s Forge, 253. 
Bladder Wrack, 542. 
Blades, Forging Knife, 338. 
Blades, Scissor, 536. 
Blaeberry, 316. 

Blankets, 656. 

Blast Furnace, 328. 

Blast, Sand, 529. 

Blasting Tunnels, 622. 
Bleaching Powder, 358. 
Blende, 661. 

Blistered Steel, 591. 
Bloaters, 302. 

Block, 73. 

Block Printing, 489. 

Block Tin, 617. 






BLOCKING HATS 


666 


BUOY 


Blocking Hats, 295. 

Blood, 73. 

Blood, Eating of, 77. 

Blood, Iron in the, 329. 
Blood Orange, 429. 
Blood-Red Ant, 20. 

Blood Stone, 3. 

Bloodhound, 179. 

Blowing, Glass, 271. 
Blowing Tube, Glass Mak¬ 
ers', 271. 

Blowpipe, 77. 

Blowpipe, Glass, 83. 
Blubber, Whale, 645, 648. 
Blue Ink, 323. 

Blue Jay, 78. 

Blue Perch, 454. 

Blue Verditer. 150. 

Blue Vitriol, 150, 636. 
Blueberry, 316. 

Bluebird, 78. 

Bluebottle Fly, 250, 

Bluefish, 78. 

Boa Constrictor, 571. 

Boar, 304. 

Boar Hound, German, 177. 
Boar, Wild, 303. 

Boat Bridges. 86. 

Boat, Whale, 647. 

Bob White, 497. 

Bobbin, 79, 369, 545. 
Bobbin-Net, 342. 

Bobolink, 79. 

Bodies Burned in Asbestus 
Cloth, 306. 

Boehm Flute, 249. 

Bog Iron Ore, 327. 

Boiler, Steam Engine, 588. 
Boilers, Bursting of, 587. 
Bolas, 308. 

Bolster, 54. 

Bolt, 80, 

Bolt of Lock, 365. 

Bomb, 555. 

Bomb Lance, 295. 
Bombard, 105. 

Bombardier Beetle, 60. 
Bombazine, 80,656. 
Bonbons, 105. 

Bond Stones, 314. 

Bone, 80. 

Bone Black, 80. 

Bone, Cuttle, 164. 

Bone Dust, 81. 

Bone Earth, 98. 

Book, 81. 

Book Covers, Dies for, 175. 
Books of Raw Silk, 560. 
Boom, 553. 

Boot, 554. 

Borax, 83. 

Bordeaux Wines, 133. 

Boric Acid, 83. 

Boron, 83. 

Bort, 171. 

Bottle, 83. 

Bottle Gourd, 281. 


Bottger and the Hair Pow¬ 
der, 487. 

Bouchots. Mussel, 413. 
Boulders Scattered by Gla¬ 
ciers, 202. 

Bourbon Whiskey, 154, 649. 
Bourgeois Type, 627. 
Bovidae, 380. 

Bow, 84. 

Bow, Violin, 636. 

Bowie Knife, 339. 

Bowline Knot, 340. 

Bowls, Wooden, 359. 
Bowsprit, 552. 

Box, Cigar, 131. 

Box, Mitre, 397- 
Box Tree, 85. 

Boxes, Musical, 620. 

Brace, 32. 

Brace in House Frame, 315. 
Brace, Smith’s, 191. 

Brad Awl, 31. 

Braganza Diamond, 173. 
Brahmapootra Fowls, 255. 
Braid, Gold, 279. 

Braid, Straw, 597. 

Brain, 419. 

Brake, 85. 

Brake Fern, 229. 

Bramble, 506. 

Brambleberry, 71. 

Branches of Plants, 475. 
Brandy. 86. 

Brass, 86. 

Brass Kettles, Making, 392. 
Brass Wire, 653. 

Brazil, Name of, 87. 

Brazil Nut, 86. 

Brazil Wood, 86. 

Bread, 87. 

Bread, Alum in, 12. 

Bread, Barley, 247. 

Bread, Brown, 524. 

Bread Fruit, 87. 

Bread, Rye, 247, 524. 

Bread, Sago, 527. 

Bread and Salt, Offering of, 
S28. 

Break in Rock Strata, 520. 
Breast Bone of Birds, 63. 
Breast Bone, Human, 382. 
Breast Wheel, 643. 
Breathing, 370. 

Breeching of Harness, 294. 
Breech-Loading Guns, 105, 
513. 

Bremen Green, 150. 

Brett, 114. 

Brevier Type, 627. 

Brick Clay, 133. 

Brick Pavement, 446. 
Bridge, 88. 

Bridle, 292. 

Brie Cheese, 125. 

Brig, 552. 

Brilliant Diamond, 172. 
Brimstone Matches, 389. 


Brimstone, Roll, 600. 
Bristles, 90. 

Bristol Board, 109. 
Britannia Bridge, 88. 
Britannia Metal, 23, 457. 
Britannia Ware, 392. 
British Gum, 286, 584. 
British Museum, Dome of, 
187. 

British Oak, 423. 

Broad Axe, 34. 

Broadcloth, 89, 656. 
Brocade, 89. 

Broccoli, 97. 

Broma, 129. 

Bronze, 89. 

Bronze, Age, 90. 

Bronze, Aluminum, 12. 
Bronze, Casting, 586. 
Bronze Chisels, 128. 

Bronze, Imitation, 391. 
Bronze Knives, 338. 

Bronze Mirrors, 396. 

Brook Trout, 621. 

Broom, 90. 

Brooms, Birch, 62. 
Brougham, 113, 116. 

Brown Coal, 139. 

Brown Hematite Iron Ore, 
327- o 

Brown Stone, 531. 

Brown Sugar, 599. 

Brown Thrasher, 616. 

Bruce the Traveller, 573. 
Brunswick Green, 150. 
Brush, 90. 

Brush Turkey, 68. 

Brussels Carpets, 111. 
Brussels Lace, 341. 
Bubbles, Steam, 587. 

Buck Rabbit, 499. 

Buckeye, 312. 

Buckskin, 91. 

Buckwheat, 91. 

Budding, 281. 

Buds of Plants, 475, 476. 
Buenos Ayres, Butter Mak¬ 
ing in, 93. 

Buffalo, 91, 380. 

Buffalo Sucker, 598. 

Bug, Lady, 342. 

Buggy, 113. 

Bugles, Bead, 51. 

Buhl Work, 634. 

Building Stone, Paris, 18. 
Bulbs, 474. 

Bull-Dog, 182. 

Bull-Frog, 259. 

Bull-Pout, 120. 
Bull-Terrier, 182. 

Bullet, 92, 513. 

Bullhead, 120. 

Bulwarks of Ship, 550. 
Bumble Bee, 316. 

Bung Hole, 46. 

Bunting, 93, 656. 

Buoy, 93. 









BURDOCK 


667 


CATERPILLAR 


Burdock, 93. 

Burgall, 454. 

Burglars, Story of, 366. 
Burin, 220. 

Burmese Umbrellas, 628. 
Burners, Gas, 267. 

Burning, 232, 437. 

Burning Glass, 297, 351. 
Burnisher, Engraving, 220. 
Burnisher, Metal, 392. 
Burnishing Gold, 279. 

Burr Oak, 423. 

Burrowing Owl, 436. 
Burrows, Muskrat, 413. 
Burs, 93, 544. 

Bush, 471. 

Bush, Green, at House-Rais¬ 
ing, 316. 

Bush Scythe, 539. 

Butter, 93, 425. 

Butter Bird, 79. 

Butter of Cacao, 129. 
Butter-Making in South- 
America, 93. 

Butterflies, Paper, of Jap¬ 
anese Jugglers, 226. 
Butterfly, 94. 

Butterfly Caterpillars, 119. 
Buttermilk, 93. 

Butternut, 95. 

Button, 96. 

Buttonball, 470. 
Buttonwood, 470. 

Buzzard. 96. 

Buzzard, Turkey, 637. 

CAB, 112. 

Cabbage, 97. 

Cabbage Lettuce, 351. 
Cabbage, Palm, 167. 
Cabbage, Palmetto, 439. 
Cabbage Rose, 521. 

Cable, 97, 521. 

Cable, Chain, 123. 
Cable-Laid Rope, 521. 

Cab, Railroad, 504. 
Cabriolet, 112, 115. 

Cacao, 129. 

Cactus, 97. 

Caen Stone, 531. 

Caesar’s Pearls, 450. 

Cages, Wicker Work, 47. 
Cake, Cotton Seed, 155. 
Cakes, Buckwheat, 91. 
Cakes, Swedish Rye, 524. 
Calabash Gourd, 281. 
Calcium, 98. 

Calcium Light, 98, 

Calcium Phosphate, 459. 
Calcutta, Black Hole of, 
371 - 

Calf Skins, 349. 

Calico, 98. 

Callimachus and the Corin¬ 
thian Column, 147. 

Calm, A, 650. 

Calmar, 401. 


Calomel, 390. 

Calyx of Flower, 248. 
Camboge, 265. 

Cambric, 99. 

Cambrics, Thread for, 359. 
Camel, 99. 380. 
Camelopard, 270, 380. 
Camels’ Hair Shawls, 116. 
Cameos, Shell, 549, 550. 
Camera, 222, 460. 

Camlet, 656. 

Camphine, 624. 

Camphor, 100. 

Camwood, 87. 

Canada Balsam, 232. 
Canada Goose, 280. 
Canada Lynx, 371. 

Canada Porcupine, 480. 
Canada Turpentine, 624. 
Can Buoys, 93. 

Canal, 100. 

Canal, Alimentary, 384. 
Canary Bird, 101. 

Candle, 103. 

Candle, Burning of a, 232. 
Candle Clock, 134. 

Candle Fish, 104. 

Candle, Roman, 237. 
Candle, Rush, 523. 

Candle, Sperm, 646. 
Candle, Stearine, 142. 
Candle, Wax, 644. 

Candy, 104. 

Candy, Grape Sugar in, 
600. 

Cane, Sugar, 598. 

Canes, Malacca, 508. 
Canine Teeth, 383. 

Canister Shot, 555. 

Canker Worms, 578. 
Cannel Coal, 139. 

Canning Fruit, 447. 
Cannon, 105. 

Cannon, Rifled, 513. 
Cannon Shot, 554. 

Canoe, 522. 

Canoe, Birch Bark, 62. 
Cantaloupe Melon, 389. 
Cantel of Saddle, 525. 
Canvas, 108. 

Canvas-Back Duck, 192. 
Canvas for Oil Cloth, 425. 
Caoutchouc, 321. 

Cap, Percussion, 512. 
Caper, 108. 

Capillaries, Blood, 74, 565. 
Capillaries of Stomach, 595. 
Capital, 146. 

Capital Letters, 626. 

Capitol at Washington, 
Dome of, 187. 

Capsicum, 454. 

Capstan, 108. 

Capsule, 262. 

Capsules, Gelatine, 268. 
Caracalla, Baths of, 49. 
Caramel, 104. 


Carat, Gold, 278. 

Carat, Precious Stone, 488. 
Caraway, 108. 

Carbolic Acid, 1, 267. 
Carbon, 108. 

Carbon in Blood, 76. 
Carbonaceous Foods, 252. 
Carbonate of Soda, 574. 
Carbonic Acid, 4, 109. 
Carbonic Acid in Water, 
641. 

Carboniferous System, 139. 
Carboy, 170. 

Carbuncle, 266. 

Carcass Shell, 556. 

Card, 109. 

Cardamom, no. 
Cardboard, no. 

Caribou, 170. 

Carmine, 140. 

Carnelian, 3. 

Carnivora, 377. 

Carolina Parrot, 444. 

Carp, no. 

Carp, Golden, 278. 
Carpenter Ants, 19. 
Carpenter Birds, 69. 

Carpet, no. 

Carpets, Cow Hair, 290. 
Carrageen, 542. 

Carrara Marble, 386. 
Carriage, hi, 115. 

Carriage Making, 115. 
Carrier Pigeon, 464. 
Carrion Beetles, 60. 

Carrion Crow, 637. 
Carronade, 105. 

Carrot, 116, 

Cars, Lobster, 364. 

Cars, Railway Passenger, 
504 - . 

Carton Pierre, 443. 
Cartridge, Springfield Rifle, 
513 - 

Carved Toys, 620. 
Carvel-Built Boat, 522. 
Case, Printers’, 489. 

Case Shot, 555. 

Caseine, 125, 395. 
Cashmere, 116, 656. 
Cashmere Goat, 276. 
Cassava, 606. 

Cassia, 132. 

Cassimere, 116, 656. 

Cassis, Liqueur de, 164. 
Cast Iron, 327. 

Cast Metal, 391. 

Cast Steel, 591. 

Castile Soap, 426, 573. 
Casting Bells, 61. 

Casting Type, 627. 

Castor Oil, 116. 

Cat, 116. 

Cat, Eyes of, 223. 
Catamount, 156. 

Catbird, 118. 

Caterpillar, 94, 119. 





CATERPILLAR 


668 


CLASSIFICATION 


Caterpillar, Silkworm, 561. 
Catfish, 120. 

Catgut, 120. 

Cathedral, 131. 

Catherine Wheels, 237. 
Catherir.ea Plum, 493. 
Catnip, 121. 

Catmint, 121. 

Cats, 377. 

Cats, Electricity in Fur of, 
208. 

Cattle, 121. 

Caucasian Race, 381. 
Cauliflower, 97. 

Caustic, 122. 

Caustic Potash, 482. 

Caustic Soda, 574. 

Caves, How Made, 202. 
Caviare, 598. 

Cayenne Pepper, 454. 
Cedar, 122. 

Cedar, Pencil, 453. 

Celery, 122. 

Cells of Honey Bee, 57. 
Cells, Plant, 471. 

Celluloid, 286. 

Cement, 122. 

Cement, Garlic, 265. 
Cement, Jaggery, 141. 
Cement, Japanese, 511. 
Cementing Furnace, 591. 
Censer, 321. 

Cent, 122. 

Centaurs, Story of the, 307. 
Centigrade Thermometer, 
615. 

Central Park, Wind Record 
in, 650. 

Century Plant, 4. 
Cephalopods, 400. 
Cephalous Moilusks, 400. 
Cereals, 153. 

Ceres, 154. 

Cereus, Night-Blooming, 
97. 249. 

Cesnola, General di, 274, 
486. 

Cetacea, 380. 

Chain, 123. 

Chain Cables, 97. 

Chain Pump, 495. 

Chain Shot, 556. 

Chair, Glass Maker’s, 271. 
Chaise, 113, 116. 
Chalcedony, 3. 

Chalk, 123; 518. 

Chalk, French, 574, 

Chalk Pencils, 453. 
Chameleon, 363. 

Chamois, 22, 380. 
Champagne, 123, 651. 
Champ-lev6 Enamel 219. 
Chancel of Church, 130. 
Changes in Life, Insect, 
325. 

Changes of Mosquito, 408. 
Chantilly Lace, 341. 


Charcoal, 124. 

Charcoal, Alder, 9. 
Charcoal, Animal, 80. 
Charcoal in Filters, 231. 
Charcoal, Linden, 359. 
Charcoal, Peat, 450. 

Chard Beets, 59. 

Chariot, hi. 

Chartreuse Cat, 117. 

Chase, Type, 490. 

Chasing Metals, 392, 586. 
Chattels, Origin of Word, 
122. 

Check, Bank, 40. 

Check Rein, 293. 
Checkerberries, 652. 
Cheese, 125, 395. 

Cheese, Cider, 131. 

Cheese Fly, 250. 

Cheese, Reindeer, 508. 
Cheiroptera, 377. 

Cherokee Rose, 521. 

Cherry, 126. 

Cherry Wood Furniture, 
203. 

Chest, Human, 382. 
Chestnut, 126. 

Chewing Tobacco, 618. 
Chibouk, 469. 

Chicago, Safes in Great 
Fire in, 526. 

Chicago Tunnel, 623. 
Chicory, 126. 

Chickadee, 126. 

Chickaree, 582. 

Chickasaw Plum, 479. 
Chickens, Raising, 256. 
Chignons, Jute, 334. 

Chili Saltpetre, 575. 

Chimes of Bells, 6r. 
Chimney, 126, 315. 
Chimney Swallow, 602. 
Chimpanzee, 24. 

China Cement, 122. 

China Clay, 134. 

China Crape, 159. 

China Dolls, 186. 

China Marbles, 387. 

China, Silkworm in, 562. 
China Ware, 484. 
Chinchilla, 127, 379. 
Chinese Bricks, 88. 

Chinese Bridges, 89. 
Chinese Cat, 117. 

Chinese Cinnamon, 132. 
Chinese Fowls, 255. 
Chinese Kites, 337. 

Chinese Pearls, 449. 
Chinese Sheet Lead, 348. 
Chinese Umbrellas, 628. 
Chinese Writing, 659. 
Chinquapins, 126. 

Chintz, 127. 

Chip Hats, 597. 

Chipmunk, 127, 379. 
Chipping Bird, 577. 

Chisel, 128. 


Chisels, Ancient Bronze, 90. 
Chittagong Fowls, 255. 
Chives, 427. 

Chillingham Castle, Wild 
Cattle of, 121. 

Chloral, 129. 

Chloride of Lime, 121, 358. 
Chloride of Silver, 563. 
Chloride of Sodium, 129. 
Chlorine, 39, 129. 
Chloroform, 129. 
Chlorophyll, 472. 

Chocolate, 129. 

Chogset, 454. 

Choir of Church, 130. 

Choir Organ, 430. 

Choroid of Eye, 222. 
Chow-Chow, 462. 

Chrome Yellow, 348. 
Chromo Lithographs, 362. 
Chronometer Watches, 640. 
Chrysalis, 120, 325. 

Chuck, Lathe, 345, 392. 
Chunkhead Snake, 570. 
Church, 330. 

Church Bells, 61. 

Church Clocks, 136. 

Church Organ, 430. 
Churning, 93. 

Chyle, 595. 

Chyme, 595. 

Cider, 7, 131. 

Cider Brandy, 86. 

Cigar, 131. 

Cigarette, 131. 

Cinnabar, 389. 

Cinnamon, 131. 

Cinnamon Bear, 52. 

Circuit, Electric, 393, 608. 
Circular Saw, 532. 
Circulation, Bank of, 41. 
Circulation of Blood, 75. 
Cirrus Clouds, 137. 

Cistern, 132. 

Cithara, 284. 

Cities, Air of, 4. 

Citric Acid, 1, 132, 350. 
Citron, 132. 

Citron Melon, 389, 

Clam, 132. 

Clam, Giant, 549, 

Clamp, 132. 

Clapboard, 133. 

Clarence, 114. 

Claret, 133. 

Clarinet, 133. 

Classes of Precious Stones, 
488. 

Classes of Stars, 583. 
Classification of Animals, 
15 - 

Classification of Birds, 65. 
Classification of Insects,326. 
Classification of Mammals, 
377 - 

Classification of Mankind, 
381. 





CLASSIFICATION 


669 


COTTON GIN 


Classification of Plants, 477. 
Classification of Reptiles, 
510. 

Classification of Rocks, 518. 
Claws of Animals, 565. 

Clay, 12, 133. 

Clay for Brick, 87. 

Clay Models, 585. 

Clay in Paper, 441. 

Clay, Pipe. 468. 

Cleopatra’s Pearl, 450. 
Clepsydra, 134. 

Cleveland Bay Horse, 311. 
Cleveland Tunnel, 623. 
Click, 507. 

Cliff Swallows, 68. 

Climbing Birds, 66. 
Clincher-Built Boat, 522. 
Clock, 134. 

Clock, Dandelion, 167. 
Clocks, Town and Church, 
136. 

Cloisonnd Enamel, 219. 
Cloth, 137. 

Cloth, Asbestus, 306. 

Cloth Buttons, 96. 

Cloth, Camel's Hair, 100. 
Cloth, Emery, 218. 

Cloth, Gunny, 334. 

Cloth, Hair, 290. 

Cloth, Hemp, 300. 

Cloth, India Rubber, 322. 
Cloth, Kapa, 410. 

Cloth, Linen, 359. 

Cloth, Manila, 385. 

Cloth, Nettle, 420. 

Cloth, Pineapple, 467. 
Cloth, Tappa, 410. 

Cloth, Water Proof, 322. 
Cloth Weaving, 369. 
Clothes Brushes, 90. 
Clothes Moth, 409. 

Cloud, Electricity from a, 
356. 357- 
Clouds, 137. 

Clover, 282. 

Cloves, 138. 

Cloves, Garlic, 265. 

Clouds, Rain, 505. 

Clusters, Star, 583. 
Clydesdale Horse, 311. 
Coach, 114. 

Coach, English Railway, 
5°4- _ 

Coaching Drag, 114. 

Coaita Monkey, 403. 

Coal, 138. 

Coal Bed, 516. 

Coal Fields, 140. 

Coal Formation, 139. 

Coal Gas, 266. 

Coal Mines, Accidents in, 

343- 

Coal Pit, 124. 

Coal Tar, 30, 267. 

Cob Nuts, 297. 

Cobblestone Pavement, 446. 


Cobalt, 140. 

Cobea, Flower of the, 247. 
Cobra de Capello, 570. 
Cobwebs, 578. 

Cochin China Fowls, 255. 
Cochineal, 140. 

Cochituate Water, 641. 
Cochituate Aqueduct, 27. 
Cock of the Plains, 284. 
Cockatoo, 444. 

Cockroach, 83, 141. 

Cocoa Beans, 129. 

Cocoa Nibs, 129. 

Cocoa Shells, 129. 

Cocoanut, 141. 

Cocoon, 325. 

Cocoon of Spider, 578. 
Cocoons, Ant, 19. 

Cocoons, Silk. 560, 562. 

Cod, 142. 

Codfish, Drying, 143. 
Coffee, 143. 

Coffee-House in London, 
First, 144. 

Coffer Dam, 167. 

Cog Wheel, 135. 

Coin, 144. 

Coining Money, 144. 

Coins, Gold, 277. 

Coins, Nickel, 421. 

Coins of United States, 10. 
Coir, 142. 

Coke, 145. 

Cold Cream, 646. 
Coleoptera, 326. 

Collar Bone, 384. 

Collar, Breast Horse, 294. 
Collar, Horse, 293. 

Collar Roof Frame, 315. 
Collodion, 286, 460. 
Cologne, 146. 

Color of Eyes, 222. 

Color in Hair, 289. 

Colored Glass, 274. 

Colors, Artists’, 439. 

Colors in Calico Printing, 

Colors in Candy, 104. 
Colors of Fishes, 238, 240. 
Colors of Flags, 243. 

Colors of Flowers, 247. 
Colors in Glass, 270. 

Colors of Gold, 277. 

Colors of the Horse, 309. 
Colors, How we See, 356. 
Colors of Light, 355, 505. 
Colors of Stars, 583. 

Colt, 307. 

Colt Revolver, 469. 
Columbus and the Sargas¬ 
so Sea, 542. 

Column, 146. 

Colza Oil, 424. 

Comb, 147, 305. 
Combination Lock, 366. 
Comets, 629. 

Commissioned Officers, 557. 


Common Bend Knot, 340. 
Compass, 148. 

Composing Stick, 489. 
Composite Order, 147. 
Composition, Type, 489. 
Compound Fruits, 262. 
Compound Eyes, 324. 
Compounds, 215. 
Compounds, Silver, 563. 
Concave Lens, 350. 

Conch Shell, 410, 549. 
Conch Shell, Pink, 550. 
Condenser of Engine, 589. 
Condensing Engine, 588. 
Condor, 636. 

Conduction of Heat, 299. 
Conductors, Electrical, 209. 
Conductors of Heat, 298. 
Conger Eel, 203. 
Conglomerate, 515. 

Conium, 300. 

Conner, 454. 

Constrictors, Boa, 571. 
Continents, 201. 

Convex Lens, 350. 

Conway Bridge, 88. 
Cooking Soda, 574. 

Cooper’s Hawk, 296. 

Copal, 149. 

Coping Stone, 314. 

Copper, 149. 

Copper Leaf, 279. 

Copper- Plate Engraving, 
220. 

Copper Plates on Ships, 
554- 

Copperas, 636. 

Copperhead Snake, 570. 
Copying Ink, 323. 
Copyright, 81. 

Coral, 150. 

Coral Jewelry, False, 286. 
Coral, Lobster, 207. 

Cord, 520. 

Corduroy, 152. 

Core of Statue Mould, 586. 
Cork, 152. 

Corn, 153. 

Corn, Broom, 90. 

Corn Starch, 154. 

Cornea of Eye, 222. 

Corned Beef, 58. 

Corinthian Order, 146. 
Cornet-a-Pistons, 306. 
Cornice, 146. 

Cornucopia, 154. 

Corolla of Flowers, 247. 
Corpuscles of Blood, 74. 
Corral, 307. 

Corrosive Sublimate, 390. 
Corset, 154. 

Corsica, Killing Crows in, 
161. 

Cos Lettuce, 351. 

Coster, Lawrence, 489. 
Cotton, 154. 

Cotton Gin, 155. 








COTTON PLANT 


670 


DISCHARGING ROD 


Cotton Plant, Flower of, 247. 
Cottonwood, 480. 
Cotyledon, 473. 

Cotyledon of Seed, 543,544. 
Couguar, 156, 377. 

Coulter, Plough. 478. 
Counter Scales, 535. 

Coupd, 113, 116. 

Coupeiet, 113. 

Course of Masonry, 314. 
Court Plaster, 330. 

Cow Bird, 163. 

Cow Cabbage, 97. 
Cow-Catcher, 504. 

Cow Milk, 395. 

Cow Pea, 446. 

Coyote, 177, 654. 

Coypu, Fur of the, 295. 
Coxwell, Mr., Balloonist, 
37 - 

Crab, 156. 

Crab Apple, 24. 

Crab, Horseshoe, 312. 

Crab, King, 312. 

Cracker Huckleberry, 316. 
Cradle, 539. 

Cradle, Engraving, 221. 
Cradle of Noss, 205. 
Cranberry, 158. 

Crane, Bird, 158. 

Crane, Machine, 158. 
Crank, 651. 

Crape, 159. 

Crawfish, 160. 

Crawfish, Eggs of, 206. 
Crayon, 160. 

Crayons for Lithographing, 
361. 

Cream, 93, 395. 

Cream, Cold, 646. 

Cream of Tartar, 482. 
Creosote, 160. 

Creamer Brake, 85. 

Cress, 160. 

Crested Porcupine, 481. 
Cricket, 160. 

Cries of Birds, 64. 

Crinoline, 290. 

Croaking of Frogs, 260. 
Crocodile, 9, 510. 

Crocodiles, Eggs of, 205. 
Crook-Neck Squashes, 581. 
Crossbow, 85. 

Cross of Prussia, 243. 

Cross, Sign of the, 162. 
Cross of St. Andrew, 243. 
Cross of St. George, 243. 
Cross of St. Patrick, 243. 
Cross-Trees of Ship, 551. 
Croton Aqueduct, 27. 

Croton Bug, 141. 

Croton Water, 641. 

Crow, 161. 

Crow Blackbird, 72. 

Crow, Carrion, 637. 

Crown Glass, 273. 

Crucible, 162. 


Crucibles, Black Lead, 73. 
Crucibles, Glass Makers', 
270. 

Crucibles, Lime. 358. 
Crucibles, Magnesia, 373. 
Crude Potash, 481. 

Crude Soda, 574. 

Crupper of Harness, 294. 
Crustaceans, 162. 
Crustaceans, Eggs of, 206. 
Crying Fish, 240. 

Crystal, Meaning of, 518. 
Crystal Rock, 497. 
Crystalline Lens of Eye, 222. 
Crystalline Rocks, 518. 
Crystals, Snow, 572. 

Cuban Bloodhound, 180. 
Cuckoo, 163. 

Cucumber, 163. 

Cudbear, 352. 

Culverin, 105. 

Cumulus Clouds, 138. 
Cunner, 454. 

Cupels, 305. 

Cups, 485. 

Curb Bit, 292. 

Curb Roof, 3x6. 

Curculio, 60. 

Curd, 395. 

Curd, Cheese, 125. 

Curled Hair, 289. 

Currant, 163. 

Currants, Zante, 506. 
Current, Electric, 213, 608. 
Current, Magneto-Electric, 
376 . 

Currents of Air, 649, 650. 
Curry, 164. 

Curve, Railroad, 502. 

Cut Nails, 416. 

Cuticle, 348. 

Cutis, 348. 

Cutter, 522. 

Cutting Diamonds, 171. 
Cutting Glass, 272. 

Cuttle Bone, 164. 

Cuttle Fish, 164, 400. 

Cuttle Fish Ink, 323. 
Cydonia, Quince named 
from, 498. 

Cygnet, 603. 

Cylinder Electrical Ma¬ 
chine, 210. 

Cylinder of Engine, 588. 
Cylinder Glass, 273, 

Cylinder Printing Press, 491. 
Cymbals, 165. 

Cymblings, 581. 

Cypress, 165. 

Cypress Vine, Flowers of, 
249. 

Cyprus, Copper named 
from, 150. 


DACE, 166. 

Dado, 146. 
Daguerreotype, 460. 


Dahl, Dr., 166. 

Dahlia, 166. 

Daisy, 166. 

Dam, 166. 

Dam in Furnace, 328. 
Damaghan, Persia, 170. 
Damask, 167, 656. 

Damask Rose, 521. 
Damson, 479. 

Dandelion, 167, 249. 
Dandelion, Seeds of the, 
544 - 

Date, 167. 

Day and Night, Cause of, 

197, 200. 

Day, Meaning of a. 631. 
Days, Halcyon, 336. 

Days and Nights, Equal, 

198. 

Days and Nights, Differ¬ 
ence in Length of, 199. 
Days, the Thirteen Drifty, 
572 - 

Dead Sea, Bitumen in, 71. 
Deaf Adder, 570. 

Decanter, Making a, 272. 
Deciduous Plants, 471. 
Deckle, Paper, 442. 

Decks of Ship, 550. 

Deer, 168, 380. 

Deer Mouse, 410. 

Deer, Musk, 412. 

Defiance, Flag of, 243. 

Delft Ware, 483, 487. 
Deposit, Bank of, 40. 
Demijohn, 170. 

Dermis, 348, 565. 

Derrick, 159. 

Desclieux, Captain, brings 
Coffee to America, 144. 
Devil Fish of Victor Hugo, 
402. 

Devil's Darning Needle, 
188. 

Devon Cattle, 121. 

Dew, 170. 

Dew Point, 170. 

Dewberry, 71. 

Dextrine, 286, 584. 

Dextrose, 599. 

Diamond, 171. 

Diamond Cement, 122. 
Diamond Cutting, 171. 
Diaper, 167. 

Diaphragm, Human, 382. 
Dicotyledons, 473, 544. 

Die, 174. 

Die of Column, 146. 

Dies on Books, 83. 

Dies for Metal Stamping, 
392 - 

Digestion, 594. 

Dime, 175. 

Diocletian, Baths of, 49. 
Diptera, 326. 

Discharging Rod, Electri¬ 
cal, 212. 








DISCOUNT 


671 


ENGRAVING 


Discount, Bank of, 41. 
Distaff, 155, 175. 

Distemper, Dog, 177. 
Distilled Water, 641. 
Distilling, 8. 

Divers, Pearl, 449. 

Divers, Sponge, 581. 

Diving Armor, 13, 176. 
Diving Bell, 5, 175. 

Dock, 176. 

Doctor, Calico Printing, 99. 
Doe Rabbit, 499. 

Doeskin, cloth, 656. 

Dog, 177, 378 . 

Dog Cart, 113. 

Dog, Esquimau, 567. 

Dog Fish, 548. 

Dog Fleas, 245. 

Dog Hunting Truffles, 263. 
Dog and Seals, Story of, 
54 i- 

Dog-Skin Gloves, 350. 
Dogwood, Poison, 601. 
Dolls, 184, 620. 

Dolphin, 380. 

Dom, 187. 

Dome, 186. 

Dora, Fish, 240. 

Doric Order, 146. 

Dorking Fowls, 255. 
Dorsibranchiata, 656 
Dory, 143, 522. 

Double Bass, 635. 

Dovetail, 187. 

Dowel, 187. 

Down, 187. 

Down of Eider Duck, 207, 
Drag, 114. 

Dragon Fly, 187. 

Draisine, The, 633. 
Draught-Horse, 311! 

Draw Bridges, 89. 

Drawing Knife, 339. 
Drawing, Lithographic, 361. 
Drawing, Wire, 652. 
Dredge, 13,189, 

Dresden Porcelain, 486, 
487. 

Dried Peaches, 447. 

Drift Nets, 302, 420, 

Drifts, 139. 

Drill, 189. 

Dromedary, 99, 380. 

Drum, 191, 620. 

Drum of the Ear, 195. 
Drummond Light, 98. 

Dry Dock, 176. 

Dry Fruits, 261. 

Dry Masonry, 314. 

Dry Point for Engraving, 
220. 

Dry Wines, 124, 652. 

Duck, 192. 

Duck Canvas, 108. 

Duck Hawk, 225. 

Ductility, Meaning of, 390. 
Dulse, 542. 


Dunghill Fowls, 254. 
Duomo, 187. 

Durham Cattle, 121. 

Dye, Brazil Wood, 86. 

Dye, Lac, 341. 

Dye, Logwood, 367. 

Dye, Madder, 373. 

Dyes, 192. 

Dyes, Indigo, 323. 

Dyke in Coal Seams, 139. 

EAGLE, 69, 194. 

Eagle, Coin, 195. 

Eagle, Double-Headed,243. 
Eagle, German, 243. 

Eagle and Weasel, Story 
of, 644. 

Ear, 195. 

Ear Trumpet, 622. 

Earth, 196. 

Earth, Crust of the, 518. 
Earth Nut, 448. 

Earth, Surface of, 201. 
Earth, Tunnels in, 622. 
Earthenware, 483. 
Earthworm, 657. 

East River Suspension 
Bridge, 89. 

Eating, 594. 

Eating in Haste, 595. 

Eau d’Ange, 415. 

Eau de Cologne, 146. 
Ebonite, 322. 

Ebony, 203. 

Ebony, False, 449. 

Echo, 577. 

Eclipse of Moon, 405. 
Edentata, 379. 

Edible Birds’ Nests, 542,602 
Edison Telephone, 612. 
Edison, Thomas A., 459. 
Eel, 203. 

Eel, Flute, 249. 

Egg, 203. 

Egg, Boiled, 7. 

Egg Glass, 313. 

Egg Hunting in Faroe Is¬ 
lands, 2C4. 

Eggs, Ant, 18. 

Eggs, Birds’, 64. 

Eggs, Crab, 157. 

Eggs, Cuttle Fish, 165, 400. 
Eggs, Fishes’, 240. 

Eggs, Flea, 245. 

Eggs, Fowls’, 256. 

Eggs, Frog, 259. 

Eggs, Grasshopper, 283. 
Eggs, Insects’, 324. 

Eggs, Lobster, 364. 

Eggs, Locust, 367. 

Eggs, Mosquito, 408. 

Eggs, Nuremberg, 639. 
Eggs, Ostrich, 434. 

Eggs, Oyster, 438. 

Eggs, Silkworm, 561. 

Eggs, Snakes’, 569. 

Eggs, Spider, 580. 


Eggs, Toads’, 618. 

Eggs Turn Silver Black, 
Why, 563. 

Egret, 300. 

Egyptian Combs, 147. 
Egyptian Dolls, 184. 
Egyptian Glass, 274. 
Egyptian Mortar, 122. 
Egyptian Sacred Cats, 117. 
Egyptian Tombs, Mirrors 
from, 396. 

Egyptian Writing, 659. 
Eider Duck, 207. 

Elaterium, 163. 

Elasticity of Steam, 587. 
Elder, 208. 

Elder-Flower Water, 208. 
Electrical Eel, 203. 
Electrical Machines, 210. 
Electricity, 208. 

Electricity in the Air, 356. 
Electricity in Amber, 13. 
Electricity in Cat’s Fur, 118 
Electricity from a Magnet, 
376 . 

Electricity, Strength of, 356. 
Electricity, Two Kinds of, 
209. 

Electric Telegraph, 607. 
Electro-Magnet, 375, 609. 
Electro Plate, 392. 
Electrometer, 209. 
Electrotype Plates, 394, 492. 
Element, 213. 

Elements in the Sun, 602. 
Elephant, 215, 379. 

Elephant Hunters, Arab, 
217. 

Elephant, Ice, 321. 
Elephants, Fossil, 330. 

Elk, American, 169. 

Elm, 217. 

Elytra, 59, 324, 326. 
Embankment, Railroad,502. 
Embryo of Seed, 543, 544. 
Emden Groats, 424. 
Emerald, 218. 

Emery, 12, 218. 

Emery Paper, 530. 

Enamel, 83. 218. 

Enamelled Leather, 349. 
Enamelled Slate, 566. 
Endive, Wild, 126. 

Endless Chain, 123. 
Endogen, 475. 

Enfield Bullet, 93. 

Engine, Condensing, 588. 
English Channel, Proposed 
Tunnel under, 623. 
English Cheese, 125. 
English Horse, 311. 

English Ivy, 330. 

English Sparrows, 578. 
English Terrier, 183. 
English Type, 627. 

English Walnut, 638. 
Engraving, 219. 







ENGRAVING 


672 


FOOT 


Engraving, Glass, 272, 530. 
Enlachon, 104. 

Ensigns, 242. 

Entablature, 146. 

Entellus Monkey, 403. 
Entozoa, 656, 657. 

Envelope, 221. 

Epidermis, 348, 564. 

Epsom Salts, 373. 

Ermine, 221, 378. 
Escapement of Clock, 135. 
Esquimau Dog, 177. 
Esquimau Houses, 320. 
Esquimau Sledges, 567. 
Essence of Mint, 396. 
Essential Oils, 424, 425. 
-Etching, 220. 

Ethiopian Race, 381. 

Etna, Great Chestnut on 
Mount, 126. 

Equator, The, 198. 
European Blackbird, 72. 
Evaporation, Meaning of, 

587. 

Evergreens, 471. 

Ewers, 485. 

Excavation, Railroad, 502. 
Exercise, 565. 

Exogen, 474. 

Extract of Lemon, 350. 

Eye, 222. 

Eye Glasses, 351, 394. 
Eye-Glass Rims, Shell, 619. 
Eye, Hook and, 305. 

Eyes of the Cat, 117. 

Eyes of Insects, 324. 

Eyes of Snail, 568. 

FACE OF WALL, 314. 
Factory Chimneys, 127. 
Fahrenheit’s Thermometer, 

6 i 5 . 

Faience, 483. 

Falcon, 225. 

Falconry, 225, 301. 

Families of Mankind, 381. 
Fan, 226. 

Fangs, Snake, 570. 

Fantail Pigeon, 463. 

Farms, Ostrich, 434. 

Faroe, Island of, 67. 

Faroe Islands, Egg Hunt¬ 
ing in, 204. 

Far-Sighted Eyes, 223. 

Fat, Human, 412, 

Fats as Food, 252. 

Fault in Coal Seams, 139. 
Fault in Rock Strata, 520. 
Fauna, 15. 

Feast of Dolls, 186. 

Feather, 226. 

Feather Fans, 227. 

Feather Ornaments, 228. 
Feathers of Humming 
Birds, 317. 

Feathers, Officers’, 558, 
Feathers, Ostrich, 434. 


Feathers, Peacock, 448. 
Feet of Bears, 378. 

Feet of Birds, 65. 

Feet of Cats, 378. 

Feet of Fly, 250. 

Feldspar, 228. 

Felt, 228. 

Felt Hats, 295. 

Femur, Human, 384. 
Fennel, 228. 

Fermentation, 58, 87. 

Ferns, 228. 

Ferns in Rocks, 516. 

Ferret, 229, 378. 

Ferrotype, 460. 

Fibula, Human, 384. 

Fiddle, 636. 

Fiddler Crab, 157. 

Field Guns, 107. 

Field Plover, 479. 

Fife, 229. 

Fig, 230. 

Fig Tree, India Rubber 
from a, 321. 

Figure of Eight Knot, 340. 
Figured Cloths, 137. 
Filament of Flower, 248. 
Filbert, 297. 

File, 230. 

Filigree, 230. 

Filling of Wall, 314. 

Filly, 307. 

Filter, 231. 

Finback Whale, 645. 
Fingal's Cave, 46. 

Fins of Fishes, 239. 

Fir, 231. 

Fire, 232. 

Fire Ant, 19. 

Fire Beetles, 235. 

Fire Clay, 134. 

Fire Crackers, 236. 

Fire Damp, 343. 

Fire Drills, 234, 235. 

Firefly, 235. 

Fireworks, 236. 

Fish, Singular, 240. 

Fish Breeding, 240. 

Fish Hawk, 241. 

Fish Hook, 242. 

Fish Joint, 502. 

Fisherman’s Knot, 340. 
Fishery, Coral, 151. 

Fishery, Great, 301. 

Fishery, Herring, 301. 
Fishery, Mackerel, 372. 
Fishery, Sardine, 531. 
Fishery, Seal, 540. 

Fishery, Whale, 647. 

Fishes, 238. 

Fishes, Eggs of, 206. 
Fishes, Heat in, 298. 

Fishes for Aquaria, 25, 27. 
Fishing, Bluefish, 78. 
Fishing, Cod, 142. 

Fishing, Perch, 454. 

Fishing Trout, 621. 


Fitchew, 479. 

Five-fingered Jack, 584. 
Fixed Oils, 424. 

Flag, 242. 

Flag, Auctioneer’s, 31, 
Flagstone, 446. 

Flakes, Snow, 572. 

Flame of a Candle, 233. 
Flanders Horse, 311. 
Flannel Cloth, 656, 

Flannel, Gauze, 267. 

Flap Valve, 632. 

Flask, Casting, 586. 

Flax, 244. 

Flea, 245. 

Flea, Eggs of, 207. 

Fleas, The Learned, 245. 
Flesh, 381. 

Fleshy Fruits, 261. 

Flies, Eggs of, 207. 

Flint, 246. 

Flint Glass, 270. 

Flint-lock Gun, 512. 

Flint and Steel, 389. 
Flittermouse, 49, 

Floating Dock, 176. 

Flock Paper, 443. 

Floor Boards, 315. 

Floor Cloth, 425. 

Flora, 470. 

Florentine Diamond, 172. 
Florentine Mosaic, 407. 
Flour, 87, 246. 

Flowering Plants, 476. 
Flowerless Plants, 477. 
Flowers, 247. 

Flowers, Cotton, 154. 
Flowers, Habits of, 249. 
Flowers, Perfume of, 249. 
Flowers of Sulphur, 600. 
Flue Pipes in Organ, 433. 
Flute, 249. 

Flutes of Columns, 147. 
Flux in Iron Smelting, 
328. 

Flux for Solder, 575, 

Fly, 250, 

Fly Fishing, 621. 

Fly, Gall, 265. 

Flying Fish, 239. 

Flying Frog, 260. 

Flying Squirrel, 251, 370. 
Fly Wheel, 590. 

Fly, White Man’s, 54. 

Foal, 307. 

Fodder, 153. 

Fog, 251. 

Foil, 251. 

Follicle, 262. 

Food, 252. 

Food, Butterflies as, 95. 
Food, Digestion of, 595. 
Food, Locusts as, 367, 
Food of Plants, 472. 

Food, Snails as, 568. 
Foolscap Paper, 442. 

Foot, Bones of, 385. 







FOOT OF ELEPHANT 


673 


GLUE 


Foot of Elephant, Cooking, 
217. 

Foot of Mollusk, 398. 

Foot of Spider, 579. 
Footman, 112. 

Foraminifera, 517. 

Force Pump, 495. 

Fore-and-Aft-Rigged Ves¬ 
sel, 551. 

Forecastle of Ship, 550. 
Forge, 253. 

Forge Hammer, 291. 
Forging Metals, 253, 338, 

536* 

Fork, 253. 

Form, Book, 490. 

Fossils, 516, 520. 

Foundation for House, 313. 
Founders, Type, 627. 

Fount of Type, 626. 
Fountain, 254. 

Fountain, Soda Water, 575. 
Four-in-hand, 114, 
Four-o’clock Flower, 249. 
Fowls, 254. 

Fowls, Care of, 257. 

Fox, 257, 378. 

Fox Grape, 282. 

Fox Hunting, 258. 

Fox and Swan, Story, 603. 
Foxhound, 181. 

Fragmental Rocks, 518. 
Frame of House, 314. 
Frame, Roof, 315. 
Frankincense, 286. 

Franklin and his Kite, 337. 
Franklin Plants Broom 
Corn, 90. 

Franklin Proves that Elec¬ 
tricity and Lightning are 
the same, 208. 

Franklin’s Stove, 596. 
Franklin’s Tame Hare, 292. 
Freezing Mixture, 299. 
Freezing Point, 319. 

French Bronze, 89. 

French Chalk, 123, 574. 
French Dog Cart, 113. 
French Horn, 306. 

French Walnut, 638, 
Fribourg Suspension 
Bridge, 89. 

Friendship, Salt Symbol of, 
529 - 

Frieze, 140. 

Frilled Lizard, 363, 

Fringe Tree, 600. 

Frisket of Printing Press, 

49 1 - , 

Frit, Glass, 270. 

Frog, 258. 

Frog, Eggs of, 205. 

Frog, Railroad, 503. 

Frond of Ferns, 228. 

Frost, 260. 

Frost Grape, 282. 

Fruit, 260. 


Fruits, Canning, 447. 

Fungi, 262. 

Fi’.ngi, Yeast, 660. 

Fur ; 264. 

Fur, Beaver, 53. 

Fur, Ermine, 221. 

Fur, Fitch, 479. 

Fur Lynx, 371. 

Fur, Muskrat, 413. 

Fur, Otter, 435. 

Fur, Polecat, 479. 

Fur, Rabbit, 499. 

Fur, Sable, 525. 

Fur, Seal, 541. 

Fur, Squirrel, 582. 

Furnace, Cementing, 591. 
Furnace, Glass, 270. 
Furnace for Heating, 596. 
Furnace, Iron, 327. 

Furnace, Lead, 347. 
Furniture, Oak, 423. 

Fuse, Shell, 555. 

Fusil, 512. 

Fusileers, Royal, 512. 
Fustic, 264. 

GABLE ROOF, 316. 

Gaff, 553. 

Gaits of the Horse, 310, 
Gale, A, 650. 

Galena Ore, 347, 563. 
Galley, Type, 490. 

Gallic Acid, 265. 

Galloon, 511. 

Galls, 265. 

Galvanic Battery, 213, 393. 
Galvanized Iron, 329, 661. 
Gamboge, 265. 

Game Fowls, 254. 

Garden Cress, 160. 

Garlic, 265. 

Garnet, 266. 

Garum, 15. 

Gas, 266. 

Gas from Candle Flame, 
233 - 

Gas Defined, 214. 
Gas-Holders, 266. 

Gas Lighted by the Finger, 
208, 

Gas, Natural, 456. 

Gas, Peat, 450. 

Gas Retorts, 266. 

Gas Wells, 456. 

Gases in the Sun, 601. 
Gasoline, 456. 

Gasteropods, 400, 402. 
Gastric Juice, 595. 

Gatling Gun, 107. 

Gauge of Railroad, 502. 
Gauze, 267. 

Gauze, Iron Wire, 344. 
Gaza, Gauze named from, 
267. 

Gazelle, 22, 380. 

Gazelle Hunting with Fal¬ 
cons, 225. 


Gecko, 363. 

Gelatine, 80, 267. 

Gems, 488. 

Gems, False, 83. 

General Officers, 557. 
Genghis Khan and the 
Owl, 436. 

Geology, Meaning of, 520. 
German Flute, 249. 

German Ivy, 330. 

German Silver, 421. 

German Toys, 620. 

Ghee, 94. 

Gherkins, 163, 

Giallo Antico Marble, 386. 
Giant Clam, 549. 

Giant’s Causeway, 46, 518. 
Gibbous, Meaning of, 403. 
Giblets, 280. 

Gig, 112, 115. 

Gig, Boat, 521. 

Gilbert, Dr., names Elec¬ 
tricity, 208. 

Gilding, 12, 279. 

Gilding Books, 83. 

Gilding Wall Paper, 443. 
Gilead, Balm of, 624. 

Gills of Fishes, 238. 

Gimlet, 31. 

Gimlet-Pointed Screws, 
538. 

Gimp, 268. 

Gin, 268. 

Gin, Cotton, 155. 

Ginevra, Story of, 371. 
Ginger, 268. 

Gingerbread, 268. 

Gingham, 268. 

Giraffe, 269, 380. 

Girder, House, 315. 

Girt, House, 315. 

Girth, Saddle, 525. 

Gizzard, 63. 

Glaciers, 202, 319. 

Glaisher, Mr., Balloonist, 
37 - 

Glance Coal, 139. 

Glands of Skin, 565. 

Glass, 270. 

Glass Engraving, 530. 
Glass, Etching on, 221. 
Glass, History of, 274. 

Glass Knobs of Telegraph 
Poles, 607. 

Glass Marbles, 387. 

Glass Paper, 530. 

Glass Paste, 445. 

Glauber Salts, 575. 

Glaze for Pottery, 83, 483. 
Glazing Gunpowder, 287. 
Glazing Pottery, 485. 
Globes, Glass, for Fish, 
278. 

Glove, 275, 350. 
Glowworms, 236. 

Glucose, 599. 

Glue, 268, 275. 









GLUE 


674 


IIAWK’S-BILL TURTLE 


Glue, Isinglass, 330. 

Glue, Rice, 511. 

Gluten, 275. 

Glycerine, 276. 

Gnat, 407, 

Gneiss, 281. 

Gneiss, Syenitic, 281. 

Gnu, 22. 

Goat, 276, 380. 

Goat, Rocky Mountain, 23. 
Golconda, Mines of, 171, 
173 - 

Gold, 276, 

Gold Beating, 279. 

Gold Lace, 278. 

Gold Leaf, 279. 

Gold Leaf, Boy covered 
with, 565. 

Gold Pens, 451. 

Gold Plating, 393. 

Gold Thimbles, 615. 

Golden Eagle, 194. 

Golden Plover, 479. 

Golden Robin, 37. 

Golden Vulture, 636. 
Goldfinch, American, 660. 
Goldfish, 278. 

Goodyear, Charles, 322. 
Gooffah, Boat, 47. 

Goose, 280. 

Goose Feathers, 227. 
Gooseberry, 280. 

Gopher, 626. 

Gorilla, 24. 

Gorseberry, 280. 

Goshawk, 296, 

Gotha Almanac, 10. 

Gothic Columns, 147. 
Go-to-bed-at-noon Flower, 
249. 

Gouber Nut, 448. 

Gouge, 129. 

Gourd, 280. 

Gourd Fruits, 261. 
Governor, Steam Engine, 
590 - 

Grade, Meaning of, 502. 
Grading, Railroad, 502. 
Graft, 281. 

Grafting, 281. 

Graham, 87. 

Graham Flour, 246. 
Grahamite, 446, 

Grain, 261. 

Grain Tester, 534. 
Grallatores, 66. 

Grampus, 380. 

(>and Duke Diamond, 172. 
Grand Falconer, 225. 
Granite, 281. 

Granulated Sugar, 599. 
Grape, 282. 

Grape Shot, 555. 

Grape Sugar, 104, 599. 
Graphite, 72. 

Grass, 282. 

Grass Hats, 597. 


Grass Hook, 538. 

Grass Scythe, 539. 
Grasshopper, 282. 

Gray Shark, 548. 

Gray Squirrel, 581. 

Gray Telephone, 612. 

Gray Wolf, 653. 

Gravel, 283, 515. 

Graving Dock, 176, 

Great Bell of Kioto, 61. 
Great Bell of Moscow, 61. 
Great Horned Owl, 436. 
Great Organ, 430. 

Greek Alphabet, 659. 

Greek Glass, 274. 

Greek Ploughs, 478. 

Green Gage Plum, 479. 
Green Monkey, 404. 

Green of Plants, 472. 

Green Tea, 607. 

Green Turtle, 625. 

Green Vitriol, 636. 
Greenland Whale, 645. 
Grenades, 556. 

Greyhound, 179. 

Griffon, Bearded, 636. 
Grindstone, 284. 

Grits, Wheaten, 648. 
Grizzly Bear, 52. 

Groats, Oaten, 424. 

Ground Ice, 319. 

Ground Nut, 448. 

Ground Squirrel, 127, 370. 
Grouse, 284. 

Grove Battery, 213, 607. 
Grubs, Ant, 19. 

Gruyere Cheese, 125. 
Guaiacum, Gum, 357. 
Guanaco, 364. 

Guard Rails, Railroad, 503. 
Guidet Pavement, 446. 
Guinea Fowl, 284. 

Guinea, Gulf of, Color of 
Water in, 201. 

Guinea Pig, 285, 379. 
Guipure Lace, 341. 

Guitar, 285. 

Gull, 285. 

Gullet, 594. 

Gullet, Human, 383. 

Gum, 286. 

Gum Camphor, 190. 

Gum, Chewing, 456. 

Gum Drops, 105. 

Gum Elastic, 321. 

Gum Guaiacum, 357. 

Gum Mastic, 388. 

Gum Myrrh, 414. 

Gum, Postage Stamp, 584. 
Gun Cotton, 286. 

Gun Harpoon, 294. 

Gun Metal, 89, 106. 

Gunny Bags, 334. 
Gunpowder, 286. 

Gunwale of Boat, 522, 
Gutenberg, John, 489. 

Gutta Percha, 287. 


Gypsum, 287. 

Gypsum Alabaster, 7. 

HACK, 112. 

Hackling, 244. 
Hackmatack, 344. 

Hackney Coach, 112, 115. 
Hail, 289. 

Hair, 289. 

Hair Brushes, 90. 

Hair, Cow, 406. 

Hair Cloth, 290. 

Hair Cloth, Whalebone in. 
648. 

Hair, Felting of, 228. 

Hair, Goat’s, 276. 

Hair Pencils, 452. 

Hair, Uses of Human, 290. 
Hair Worm, 657. 

Halcyon, 336. 

Half Cent, 122. 

Half-Hitch Knot, 340. 
Halibut, 290. 

Hamburg Fowls, 255. 
Hames, 293. 

Hamilton Castle, Wild Cat¬ 
tle of, 121. 

Hammer, 290. 

Hammer Oyster, 549. 
Hammer, Power, 328. 
Hand, Bones of, 384. 

Hand Grenades, 556. 

Hand Mirrors, 396. 

Hand Screws, 133. 

Handles, Knife, 339. 
Handsaw, 532. 

Hang-Bird, 37. 

Hanno’s Lion, 360. 

Hard Water, 641. 

Hare, 292, 379. 

Haricot, 51. 

Harness, 292. 

Harp, 294. 

Harpoon, 294, 647. 
Harpsichord, 461. 
Harquebus, 512. 

Harrow, 295. 

Harrow, Ice, 320. 

Hart’s Tongue, Fern, 229. 
Hartshorn, 14, 

Hartshorn, Burnt, 80. 
Hassar, Fish, 240. 

Hasty Pudding, 153. 

Hat, 295. 

Hatchet, 34. 

Hats, Beaver, 53. 

Hats, Straw, 597. 
Haustellate Insects, 324,327. 
Hautboy, 296. 

Havana Cigars, 131. 

Havoc, Meaning of, 297. 
Havre de Grace, Bridge at, 
88 . 

Hawk, 296. 

Hawk Moth, 409. 

Hawking, 225, 301. 
Hawk's-Birl Turtle, 619,626. 






HAWSER 


675 


INSECT 


Hawser Laid Rope, 521. 
Hay, 297. 

Haze, 251. 

Hazel Nut, 297. 

Head, Human, 383. 

Headers in Masonry, 314. 
Heading of Tunnel, 622. 
Healds of Loom, 368. 

Heart, Human, 74. 

Heart Wood, 474. 

Heat, 297. 

Heat, Boiling, 587. 

Heat, Conduction of, 298. 
Heat from Lime, 358. 

Heat, Radiation of, 299, 
Heat of the Sun, 601. 

Heavy Spar, 43. 

Hedge Hog, 378 . 
Heidelberg Town Clock, 
136. 

Heliogabalus’s Tigers, 617. 
Helix, 375, 611. 

Helmont, Van, Names Gas, 
267. 

Helve, Axe, 32. 

Hematite Iron Ore, 327. 
Hemiptera, 326. 

Hemlock, 300. 

Hemp, 300. 

Hemp, Manila, 385. 

Hen Hawk, 96, 296. 
Henrietta Cloth, 656. 

Herb, 471. 

Herd’s Grass, 282. 

Hermit Crab, 157. 

Heron, 300. 

Heronries, 301. 

Herring, 301. 

Herring Gull, 285. 
Herschel’s Telescope, 613. 
Herse; Parchment, 444. 
Hickory, 302. 

Hide of Animals, 349. 

Hide of Horse, 312. 

Hide, Uses of Hippopota¬ 
mus, 302. 

High Bridge, New York, 88. 
High Pressure Engine, 590, 
Hinny, 410. 

Hip Bones, Human, 384. 
Hip Roof, 316. 
Hippopotamus, 302, 379. 
Hoar Frost, 260. 

Hock, Wine, 303. 

Hoe, 303. 

Hog, 303, 379. 

Hog and Rattlesnakes, 570. 
Hog Skin, 350. 

Holder, Gas, 266. 
Holderness Cattle, 121. 
Holibut, 290. 

Hollands, 268. 

Holly, 423. 

Holm Oak, 423. 

Hominy, 153. 

Hon^, 304. 

Honey, 56, 304. 


Honey, Idumble Bee, 317. 
Honey, Linden Flower, 359. 
Honey Locust, 367. 
Honeycomb Bag, 380. 
Iioniton Lace, 341. 

Hoof, 304. 

Hoofs and Horns, 563. 
Hook and Eye, 305. 
Hookah, 469. 

Hoops, Barrel, 62. 

Hoosac Tunnel, 623. 

Hops, 305. 

Horn, 305. 

Horn Bug, 60. 

Horn, Musical Instrument, 
306. 

Hornblende, 306. 

Horned Owl, 435, 436. 
Horned Pout, 120. 

Hornet, 306. 

Horns, 22. 

Horns, Deer, 168. 

Horse, 307, 379. 

Horse Chestnut, 312. 

Horse Hair, 290. 

Horse Hoe, 303. 

Horse Mackerel, 78. 

Horse Power, 591. 

Horse Radish, 312. 

Horse Railroad, 505. 
Horse-Timers, 640. 

Horse, Uses of the, 312. 
Horsefoot, 312. 

Horses, Catching Eels with, 
203. 

Horses, Fossil, 309. 
Horseshoe, 312. 

Horseshoe Crab, 312. 
Horseshoe Magnet, 374. 
Hospitals for Cats, 117. 
Hound, 180. 

Hound, German Boar, 177. 
Hour Glass, 134, 313. 
House, 313. 

House Fly, 230. 

House of the Mole, 398. 
House Raising, 316. 

House Sparrow, 578. 

House Wren, 638. 

Houses, Ice, 320. 

Houses, Tea, 607. 

Howe Sewing Machine, 545. 
Howitzer, 105. 

Hubbard Squash, 381. 
Huckleberry, 316. 

Hudson Bay Squirrel, 582. 
Hull of Ship, 530. 

Human Hair, Uses of, 290. 
Humble Bee, 316. 

Humble Bees, Pollen Car¬ 
ried by, 248. 

Humboldt, 166. 

Humerus of Arm, 384. 
Humming Bird, 317. 
Humming Bird Moth, 409. 
Hunt Sewing Machine, 545. 
Hunting the Buffalo, 92. 


Hunting Foxes, 258. 
Hunting Leopard, 351. 
Hunting Lions, 360. 
Hunting Llamas, 364. 
Hunting Muskrats, 413. 
Hunting Raccoons, 500. 
Hunting Tigers, 617. 
Hunting Wild Turkeys, 
623. 

Hurricane, A, 650. 
Hurtleberry, 316. 

Husking Corn, 134. 

Hutch, Rabbit, 499. 
Hydraulic Press, 643. 
Hydrochloric Acid, 1. 
Hydrocyanic Acid, 1. 
Hydrogen, 318. 
Hydrophobia, 177. 
Hydrostatic Press, 348, 643. 
Hyena, 318. 

Hymenoptera, 326. 

IBYCUS, CRANES OF, 
158. 

Ice, 319. 

Ice, Artificial, 299, 320. 

Ice Cream, Freezing, 299. 
Ice, Cutting, 320. 

Ice Houses, 320. 

Ice Islands, 319. 

Ice Palace, Russian, 320. 
Icebergs, 319. 

Iceland, Horses of, 310. 
Iceland Moss, 352. 

Icelandic Side Saddle, 526. 
Igneous, Rocks, 518. 
Iguana, 363. 

Images in Water Upside 
Down, 333. 

Imago, 323. 

Imbricated Turtle, 619. 
Imposing Stone, 490. 
Impurities of Blood, 77. 
Incense, 321. 

Incense, Amber, 13. 

Incisor Teeth, 383. 

Indelible Ink, 323. 

India Muslins, 413. 

India Paper, 410. 

India Rubber, 321. 

India Rubber Combs, 148. 
India Rubber Thimbles, 
615. 

India Shawls, 116. 

Indian Corn, 153, 543. 
Indian Ponies, 313. 

Indians of America, 381. 
Indigo, 323. 

Indorsement, 41. 
Infiltration, Stone made by, 
SIS- 

Ingots, Steel, 591. 

Ink, 323. 

Ink, Cuttle Fish, 163. 
Inlaying Tortoise Shell, 619. 
Innocent VIII., Pope, 77. 
Insect, Lac, 341. 





INSECTIVORA 


676 


LEAF PORES 


Insectivora, 378. 

Insects, 323. 

Insects, Classification of, 
326. 

Insessores, 65. 

Intaglio, 174. 

Interest on Money, 40. 
Ionic Order, 146. 

Iris of Eye, 222, 223. 

Irish Moss, 542. 

Irish Potato, 482. 

Iron, 327. 

Iron Age, 90. 

Iron Cables, 97. 

Iron Castings, 328. 

Iron, Galvanized, 65i. 

Iron Mountain, 327. 

Iron Pavement, 446. 

Iron Pyrites, 600. 

Iron Safes, 526. 

Iron Shears, 537. 

Iron Toys, 620. 

Iron Wire, 653. 

Isabella, Columbus’s Pres¬ 
ents to Queen, 603. 
Isinglass, 268, 330, 394. 
Isochronism of Pendulum, 
T I 3S- 

Italian Paste, 372. 

Italic Letters, 11, 626. 

Ivory, 330. 

Ivory Fans, Chinese, 226. 
Ivory, Vegetable, 330. 

Ivory Veneer, 634. 

Ivy, 330. 

Ivy, Poison, 600. 

JACK PLANE, 470. 
Jackal. 332, 378. 

Jackets, Cork, 152. 

Jacobin Pigeon, 464. 
Jack-o'-lanterns, 496. 
Jaggery, 141. 

Jaguar, 332. 

Jelly Fish. 333. 

Jamaica Pepper, 10. 
Jamaica Rum, 523. 

Japan Sea, Color of Water 
in, 201. 

Japanese Bronzes, 391. 
Japanese Feast of Dolls, 
186. 

Japanese Kites, 337. 
Japanese Lacquer, 601. 
Japanese Mirrors, 396. 
Japanese Umbrellas, 628. 
Japanese Writing, 659. 
Jasper, 332. 

Java Coffee, 144. 

Jawbones, Human, 383. 
Jennet, 311. 

Jerked Beef, 58. 

Jersey Cattle, 121. 
Jerusalem Artichoke, 29. 
Jet, 333- 

Jewellers’'Foil, 231. 

Jewelry, Cora], 151. 


Jewelry, India Rubber, 322. 
Jewelry, Jet, 334. 

Jew’s Harp, 334. 

Jibs, 552. 

Joggle. 334. 

Joint, Joggle, 334. 

Joints in Masonry, 314. 
Joist, House, 314. 

Jolly Boat, 522. 

Jordan Almonds, 11. 
Jugglers and Fans, 226. 
Jugglers, Indian, 571. 
Jujube, 334. 

Juniper, 334. 

Jupiter, Planet, 629. 

Jupiter Serapis, Temple of. 
399- 

Justifying Type, 490. 
Justinian I., Emperor, 562. 
Jute, 334. 

KALE, 97. 

Kaleidoscope, 333. 

Kalm, Peter, 346. 

Kalmia, 336. 

Kalsomine, 439. 

Kangaroo, 335, 379. 

Kaolin, 134. 

Kapa Cloth, 410. 

Karat, Gold, 278. 

Katydid, 283. 

Kelp, 574. 

Kermes Oak, 423. 

Kerosene, 456. 

Kerseymere, 116, 656. 

Kettle Drum, 192. 

Key Fruit, 262. 

Key, Telegraph, 608. 
Keyboard of Piano, 462. 
Keyboards of Organ, 430. 
Keys, 366. 

Knobbed Wrack, 542. 
Kicking-Strap of Harness, 
294- 

Kid Gloves, 275. 

Kid Leather, 350. 
Kidderminster Carpets,in. 
Kidney Bean, 51. 

Kidneys, 77. 

Kiln, Brick, 88. 

Kiln, Glaze, 486. 

Kiln, Lime, 358. 

Kiln, Pottery, 485. 

King of Beasts, 360. 

King Crab, 312. 

King Charles Spaniel, 182. 
King-Post Roof Frame, 315. 
Kingdom, Vegetable, 477. 
Kingdoms of Nature, 215. 
Kingfisher, 68, 335. 

King’s Staple, 536. 

Kioto, Great Bell of, 61. 
Kirschwasser, 126. 

Kite, 336. 

Knee-Pan, Human, 383. 
Knife, 338. 

Knives, Ancient Bronze, 90. 


Knots, 339. 

Koh-i-noor Diamond, 173. 
Koumiss, 312. 

Kraken, 401. 

Krupp’s Foundry, 162. 
Krupp Works, Great Plam- 
mer of, 291. 

Kiimmel, 108. 

Kupfernickel, 421. 

LAC, 341. 

Lace, 341. 

Lace Frame, 342. 

Lace, Thread'for, 359. 
Lacquer, 342. 

Lacquer Varnish, 601. 
Lactic Acid, 395. 
Lactucarium, 351. 
Lady-Bird, 342. 

Lager Bier, 59. 

Laid Paper, 442. 

Lake, 140. 

Lake Iron Ore, 327. 

Lake Superior Copper, 149, 
150- 

Lake Water, 640. 
Lammergeyer, 636. 

Lamp, 342. 

Lamp Black, 344. 

Lamp, Safety, 343. 

Landau, 114, 116. 
Landaulet, 113. 

Landes, Stilts in the, 593. 
Land-side, Plough, 478. 
Lapis Lazuli, 344. 

Lapland Cheese, 125. 
Lapland Reindeer, 508. 
Lap-streak Boat, 522. 
Larch, 344. 

Lark, 344. 

Larva, 325. 

Larva, Beetles’, 59, 

Lasso, 307. 

Last, Shoe, 554. 

Lath, 315, 344. 

Lath, Rooting, 345. 

Lathe, 345. 

Lathe, Engraving, 43. 
Lathe, Jeweller’s, 346. 
Laudanum, 427. 

Launch, 522. 

Laurel, 346. 

Laurel Magnolia, 376. 

Lava, 347, 518. 

Lavender, 347. 

Lawn, 99. 

Lawn Mowers, 539. 

Lawton Blackberry, 71. 
Layers, Plant, 476. 

Laying of Fowls, 256. 

Leach Tub, 481. 

Lead, 347. 

Lead Pencils, 452. 

Lead Pipe, 348. 

Leaded Type, 490. 

Lead, Uses of, 348. 

Leaf Pores, 473. 







LEAN-TO ROOF 


677 


MALTESE 


Lean-to Roof, 315. 

Leap of a Flea, 245. 
Learned Fleas, 245. 
Leather, 348. 

Leather, Alligator, 10. 
Leather, Ass, 30. 

Leather, Caribou, 170. 
Leather, Russia, 62. 
Leather Scraps, 350. 
Leather, Seal, 541. 
Leavened Bread, 87. 
Leaves of Plants, 476. 
Lebanon, Cedar of, 122. 
Leech, 657. 

Leek, 427. 

Leghorn Hats, 597. 

Legs, Human, 384. 

Legs, Insects’, 323. 
Legume, 262. 

Legumine, 253. 

Lemon, 350. 

Lens, 350. 

Lentil Seed, Lens named 
from, 351. 

Leopard, 351, 377. 
Lepidoptera, 326. 

Letter Balance, 535. 

Letters, 659. 

Letters, Italic, 11. 

Letters, Roman, it. 

Letters, Script, 11. 

Lettuce, 351. 

Levels, Canal, 100. 

Lewis, 351. 

Lexias Raisins, 506. 

Eey, 573. 

Leyden Jar, 212. 

Liberty Bell, Philadelphia, 
61. 

Lichens, 352. 

Ligaments, 384. 

Light, 352. 

Light, Division of into Col¬ 
ors, 355. 

Light, Electric, 213. 

Light, Magnesium, 373. 
Light of the Planets, 631. 
Light of the Sun, 602. 
Lightning, 356. 

Lightning Bug, 235. 
Lightning Rods, 211, 357. 
Lightning, Strength oi, 356. 
Lignite, 139. 

Lignum Vitas, 357. 

Lilac, 357. 

Lima Bean, 51. 

Limber of Gun, 107. 

Lime, 358. 

Lime, Chloride of, 129. 
Lime, Fruit, 350. 

Jme Tree, 358. 

Limerick Hooks, 242. 
Limerick Lace, 341. 
Limestone, 358, 386, 517. 
Limestone, Lithographic, 
361. 


Linden, 358. 

Line Engraving, 220. 
Linen, 359. 

Linen Damask, 167. 
Linseed, 244, 359. 

Linseed Oil, 439. 

Lion, 359, 377. 

Lion, American, 156. 

Lion and Jackal, 332. 
Liquid, Meaning of, 214. 
Liquorice, 361. 

Liquors, Distilled, 8. 

Lisle Lace, 341. 

Litharge, 348. 

Lithograph, 361. 

Litmus, 1, 9, 352. 

Little Horned Owl, 436. 
Live Oak, 423. 

Livingstone on Lions, 361. 
Lizard, 362. 

Lizards, Eggs of, 205. 
Llama, 363, 380. 

Loadstone, 373. 

Loaf Sugar, 599. 

Lobster, 364. 

Lobster, Eggs of, 206. 
Lock, 365. 

Locks, Canal, 101. 
Lockstitch, 546. 

Lockyer, Professor, 214. 
Locomotive, 501, 504. 
Locust, 366. 

Locust Tree, 367. 
Loggerhead Turtle, 625. 
Logwood, 367. 

Lombardy Poplar, 480, 597. 
Long Bow, 84. 

Long Island Sound, Oyster 
Beds in, 438. 

Long-Primer Type, 627. 
Long-Staple Cotton, 154. 
Long-Staple Wool, 655. 
Loom, 367. 

Loopers, 119. 

Lord of the Rubies, 523. 
Louisiana Heron, 300. 
Louisiana, Pelican Emblem 
of, 451. 

Louisville Bridge, 89. 

Louse, 369. 

Love Apples, 619. 
Lower-Case Letters, 626. 
Low-Pressure Steam En¬ 
gine, 589. 

Lozenges, 105. 

Lucifer Matches, 389, 459. 
Lumber, Hemlock, 300. 
Lunar Caustic, 122. 

Lungs, 369. 

Lung Arteries, 75. 

Lye, 481. 

Lyons Town Clock, 136. 
Lynx, 371, 377. 

MACARONI, 372. 

Macaw, 444. 


Mace, 422. 

Maceration, Perfumes made 
by, 454 - 

Machine, Hat Body, 295. 
Machine, Hook and Eye, 
305 - 

Machine, Horseshoe, 312. 
Machine Lace, 342. 
Machine, Nail, 416. 
Machine, Needle, 418. 
Machine Paper Making, 
442. 

Machine, Paper Pulp, 441. 
Machine, Peat, 450. 
Machine, Pin, 465. 

Machine, Rope Spinning, 
520. 

Machine, Screw, 538. 
Machine, Sewing, 545. 
Machine, Shoe Making,554. 
Machine, Straw Sewing, 
597 - 

Machine, Thimble, 615. 
Machine, Watch Making, 
640. 

Mackerel, 372. 

Mackerel Shark, 548. 
Madder, 373. 

Madeira Nut, 638. 

Madrina, 410. 

Magnesia, 373. 

Magnesia, Greece, Magnet 
named from, 376. 
Magnesium, 373. 

Magnet, 373. 

Magnetic Iron Ore, 327. 
Magnetic Poles, 374. 
Magnetism, 373. 
Magneto-Electricity, 376. 
Magnets, Electro, 609. 
Magnets, Iron and Steel, 
375 - 

Magnets in Telephone, 610. 
Magnifying Glass, 351, 394. 
Magnol, Pierre, 376. 
Magnolia, 376. 

Magpie, 376. 

Maguey, 4. 

Mahogany, 376. 

Maiden Hair Fern, 229. 
Mainspring, Watch, 639. 
Maize, 153. 

Maizena, 154. 

Majolica, 483, 487. 

Malacca Canes, 508. 
Malachite, 149. 

Malachite Veneer, 634. 
Malay Fowls, 255. 

Malay Race, 381. 

Malic Acid, 1. 

Mallard, 192. 

Malleability, Meaning of, 
390 . 

Malleable Iron, 329. 

Malt, 58. 

Maltese Cat, 117. 








MALTESE 


6;3 


MONT BLANC 


Maltese Work, Filigree, 230. 
Mammals, 376. 

Mammals, Classification of, 
377 - 

Mammoths, Ivory from 
Frozen, 330. 

Man, 380. 

Man, Descent of, 381. 
Man-Eater Shark, 547. 
Mandarin Orange, 429. 
Mandibles, 324. 
Mandibulate Insects, 324, 
326. 

Mandioc, 606. 

Mandrel, 106, 345, 348. 
Mandrill, 35. 

Mandubi. 448. 

Mangel Wurzel Beets, 59. 
Mango, 385. 

Manila, 385. 

Mankind, Classification of, 
381. 

Manna, 29. 

Mannheim Gold, 86. 
Mansard Roof, 316. 

Mantle, Feather, of Sand¬ 
wich Island Kings, 228. 
Mantle of Oyster, 549. 
Mantles, Feather, Indian, 
318. 

Manual of Organ, 430. 
Manure, Bone, 81. 
Manuscript, 81. 

Manyplies, 380. 

Manx Cat, 117. 

Map Plates, 220. 

Maple, 385. 

Maple Sugar, 385, 599. 
Maps, Coloring, 362. 

Maps, Copper-Plate, 362 
Maracaibo Coffee, 144. 
Maraschino, 126. 

Marble, 386. 

Marbles, Playing, 387. 
Marble Statues, 585. 

Mare, 307. 

Mariner's Compass, 148. 
Marjoram, 388. 

Mark Antony’s Lions, 360. 
Marking Ink, 323. 

Marl, 133, 517. 

Marmalade, 388. 
Marmosets, 403. 

Marmots, 379. 

Marrons, 126. 

Marrow Squash, 581. 

Mars, Planet, 629. 

Marsh Gas, 456. 

Marsh Iron Ore, 327. 
Marsupialia, 379. 

Marten, 378, 388. 

Martin, 388. 

Martingale, 293. 
Martini-Henry Rifle, 514. 
Marver, Glass Makers’, 84, 
271. 


Mary's Grass, 352. 

Masks, 620. 

Mason Spiders, 580. 
Masonry, 313. 

Massa Bowls for Pipes, 
469. 

Mastic, 388. 

Mastiff, 182. 

Masts of Schooner, 553. 
Masts of Ship, 550. 

Mat, 388. 

Match, 389. 

Match-Lock Gun, 512. 
Matrix of Die, 174. 

Matrix of Type, 627. 

Matt, 149. 

Mattam Diamond, 173. 
Mattresses, 54. 

Maxillae, 324, 326. 

Mead, 304. 

Meadow Mouse, 410. 

Meal, Corn, 133. 

Meal, Horse Chestnut, 312. 
Meal, Oat, 424. 

Meals, Regular, 596. 
Measures, Coal, 139. 
Measuring Worms, 119. 
Meat, Salt, 7. 

Meat, Smoked, 160. 

Mechlin Lace, 341. 

Medals, Dies for, 17.;. 
Medford Rum, 523. 
Medicine, Iron in, 329. 
Meerschaum, 468. 

Melon, 389. 

Melton Cloth, 656. . 
Menageries, Lions in, 360. 
Menai Strait Bridge, 88. 
Menhaden, 531. 

Mercury, 12, 389. 

Mercury, freezing Point of, 
615. 

Mercury, Planet, 629. 
Mercury Thermometer, 614. 
Mercury Vine, 331, 600. 
Merino, 656. 

Mermaids' Purses, 206. 
Meshes in Nets, 420. 

Metal, 390. 

Metal Shears, 537. 

Metal Statues, 586. 

Metal Toys, 620. 

Metal, Type, 627. 

Metal Work, 391. 
Metalophone, 620. 

Metals Known to Ancients, 
390 - 

Metals, Sulphur in Ores of, 
600. 

Meteors, 327. 

Meter, Gas, 267. 

Mezzotint Engraving, 221. 
Mica, 394. 

Michigan Rose, 521. 
Michigan, Water cf Like, 
641. 


Microscope, 394. 

Mildew, 263. 

Mile, Fastest, on Bicycle, 
633. 

Mile, Fastest Run, 311. 
Mile, Fastest Trotted, 311. 
Milk, 253, 394. 

Milk, Condensed, 395. 

Milk, Goat's, 276. 

Milk, Mares', 312. 

Milk, Reindeer, 508. 
Milkweed, 395. 

Mill, Sugar, 598. 

Millcake, Gunpowder, 287. 
Millet, 395. 

Milling Lead, 347. 

Mills, Flour, 246. 

Milwaukee Brick, 88. 
Mineral Kingdom, 213. 
Mineral Water, 109, 641. 
Miners’ Lamp, 343. 
Minerva, Owl Sacred to, 

43 6 - . , . , . 

Mines, Carbonic Acid in, 
109. 

Mines, Lead, 347. 

Mines, Salt, 528. 

Minie Ball, 92. 

Mining Ants, 19. 

Mining, Coal, 139. 

Mining, Placer, 277. 

Minion Type, 627. 

Mink, 378, 395. 

Minnow, 166, 396. 

Mint, 396. 

Minthe, The Nymph, 396. 
Mints, United States, 145. 
Mirror, 396. 

Mist, 251. 

Mitre, 397. 

Moccasin, 554. 

Mocha Coftee, 144. 
Mocking Bird, 397. 

Model of Statue, 585. 
Models, Wax, 644. 

Molar Teeth, 383. 

Molasses, 599. 

Mole, 378, 398. 

Mole Cricket, 160. 

Mollusks, 16, 398. 

Mollusks, Eggs of, 207. 
Money, Coining, 144. 
Money, Dies for Coining, 
174. 

Mongolian Race, 3S1. 
Monitor Lizard, 363. 
Monkey, 377, 403. 
Monkey-Wrench, 658. 
Monkeys and Brazil Nuts, 
86 . 

Monkeys, Trained, 404. 
Monocotyledons, 473, 544. 
MonongahelaWhiskey, 649. 
Monsoon, 650. 

Mont Blanc, Cooking on, 
537 . 











MONT CENIS 


679 


NOBLE LAUREL 


Mont Cenis Railroad Tun¬ 
nel, 622. 

Montreal, Bell in, 61. 
Mountain Flour, 247. 

Moon, 404. 

Moon Dial, 134. 

Moon, Looks of the, 406. 
Moonlight, Rainbow in, 506. 
Moons, 629. 

Moose, 169. 

Moquette Carpets, hi. 
Mordants, 193. 

Morea, Name of the, 562. 
Moreen, 656. 

Morning Glory, Flower of 
the, 247. 

Morning Glory, Seed of, 543. 
Morocco Leather, 349. 
Morse Telegraph, 607. 
Mortar, 105, 406. 

Mortise, 407. 

Mosaic, 407. 

Moscow, Great Bell of, 61. 
Mosquito, 407. 

Mosquito, Eggs of, 207. 
Mosquito Hawk, 188. 

Moss, Bread made of, 247. 
Mosses, 408. 

Moss, Iceland, 352. 

Moss Rose, 521. 

Moth, 408. 

Moth Caterpillars, 1x9. 
Moth, Silkworm, 560. 
Mother Cary’s Chicken,285. 
Mother of Pearl, 409. 
Motion of Earth around 
Sun Shown by Lamp and 
Orange, 197. 

Motion of the Sun, 602. 
Motions of Sun and Stars, 
197 - 

Motor Nerves, 420. 

Mould, 263. 

Mould Board, Plough, 478. 
Mould for Metal Statue, 586. 
Mould, Paper, 441. 

Mould of Statue, 585. 
Mould, Type, 627. 
Moulding Glass Bottles, 84. 
Moulds, Pottery, 485. 
Moulds, Sand, 391. 

Moulins, Charles des, 25. 
Mountain Ash, 29. 
Mountain Cat, 156. 
Mountains Changed by 
Water and Frost, 202. 
Mountains, ■ Forming of, 
520. 

Mountains, Measuring the 
Height of by Barometer, 
46. 

Mountains in the Moon, 
406. 

Mouse, 379, 410. 

Mousquet, 512. 
Mousseline-de-laine, 413 


Mouth-Piece of Telephone, 
611. 

Mouth-Pieces for Pipes, 
469 - 

Mowing Machines, 539. 
Mozo, Valley of, 218. 

M Roof, 316. 

Mud, 515. 

Muffle, Porcelain, 486. 
Mulberry, 410. 

Mulberry Tree, 562. 

Mule, 410. 

Mule Jenny, 156. 

Mullet, Colors of the Dying, 
238. 

Mummies of Cats, 117. 
Mummies, Egyptian, 71. 
Muriatic Acid, 1, 129. 
Muscadine Grape, 282. 
Muscalonge, 465. 

Muscatel Raisins, 506. 
Muscle, 381, 411. 

Muscles of Heart, 75. 
Muscles of Insects, 325. 
Muscovado Sugar, 599. 
Muscovy Duck, 192. 

Mush, 153. 

Mushroom, 263. 

Musical Instruments, Toy, 
620. 

Musical Notes, 576. 

Musk, 412. 

Musk Beaver, 412. 

Musk Deer, 380, 412. 

Musk Ox, 380. 

Musk Rose, 521. 

Musket, 512. 

Muskmeion, 389. 

Muskrat, 379, 412. 

Muslin, 99, 413. 
Muslin-de-laine, 656. 
Musquash, 412. 

Mussel, 413. 

Must, Grape, 651. 

Mustang, 308. 

Mustard, 4x4. 

Myrrh, 414. 

Myrtle, 415. 

Myrtle Wax, 644. 

NACRE, 409. 

Nail, 416. 

Nails, Finger and Toe, 

565. 

Nandu, 435. 

Nankeen, 155, 416. 

Nap of Cloth, 656. * 
Napoleon and Oysters, 437. 
Naphtha, 267, 456. 
Nargileh, 469. 

Narwhal, 380. 

Nasturtium, 160. 

Natatores, 66. 

Nautilus, 402. 

Naval Observatory, Tele¬ 
scope of, 614. 


Nave of Church, 130. 

Navy, Officers of, 557. 
Navy, Shoulder Straps of, 
559 - 

Near-Sighted Eyes, 223. 
Neat Cattle, 121. 

Nebulce, 583. 

Neck, Human, 383. 
Necklace Poplar, 480. 
Nectarine, 447. 

Needle, 416. 

Needle Guns, 514. 

Negative Electricity, 209, 
356 . 

Negative, Photographic, 
460. 

Negro, Flair of the, 289. 
Neptune, Planet, 629. 

Nero Antico Marble, 386. 
Nero’s Tigress, 617. 

Nerve, Optic, 223. 

Nerves, 418. 

Nests, Birds’, 67. 

Nests, Edible Birds’, 542, 
602. 

Nests of Eider Duck, 207. 
Nests of Fish-Hawks, 241. 
Nests, Hornets’, 306. 

Nests of Humming Birds, 
317 - 

Nets, 420. 

Nets, Drift, 302. 

Nets, Sardine, 531. 

Nettle, 420. 

Neufchatel Cheese, 125. 
Neuroptera, 326. 

New England Rum, 523. 
Newfoundland Dog, 178. 
Newfoundland, Grand 
Bank of, 142. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 355. 

New York, Bells of, 61. 
Niagara Suspension 
Bridge, 89. 

Nibbler, 454. 

Nickel, 420. 

Nicot, Jean, 618. 
Night-Blooming Cereus, 97. 
Night and Day, Cause of, 

197, 200. 

Nights and Days, Differ¬ 
ence in Length of, 199. 
Nights and Days, Equal, 

198. 

Nimbus Clouds, 138. 
Nippers, 466, 467. 

Nitrate of Silver, 563. 
Nitrates, 421. 

Nitre, 529. 

Nitric Acid, 421. 

Nitro Glycerine, 276. 

Nitro Glycerine, Blasting 
with, 622. 

Nitrogen, 421. 

Nitrogenous Foods, 252. 
Noble Laurel, 346. 





NOBLE OPAL 


6 So 


PAPER 


Noble Opal, 427. 
Non-Conductors, Electri¬ 
cal, 209. 

Nonpareil Type, 627. 
Nopal, 98, 140. 

Northern Lights, 32. 
Norway, King of, and Her¬ 
rings, 301. 

Norway Rat, 506. 

Noss, Pillar of, 205. 

Note, Bank, 41, 42. 

Note for Money, 41. 

Nova Scotia Stone, 531. 
Nugget, Meaning ot, 277. 
Number of the Stars, 583. 
Nun Pigeon, 464. 
Nuremberg Eggs, 639. 

Nut, 261. 

Nut, Bolt, 80. 

Nut Galls, 265. 

Nutmeg, 422, 

Nutmeg Melon, 389. 

Nuts, Beech, 57. 


OAK, 423. 

Oak, Poison, 6co. 

Oars, 522. 

Oats, 423. 

Oberstein Agates, 387. 
Object Glass, 394. 

Oboe, 296. 

Obsidian Mirrors, 396. 
Oceans, 201. 

Ochre, 327. 

Octopus, 401. 

Officers, Commissioned, 


557 - 

Ogee Roof, 316. 

Oils, 424. 

Oil Bag of Birds, 227. 
Oil, Beech, 57. 

Oil of Bergamot, 62. 
Oil, Brazil Nut, 86. 

Oil Cake, 359. 

Oil of Caraway, ic8. 
Oil of Cinnamon, 132. 
Oil Cloth, 425. 

Oil of Cloves, 138. 

Oil, Cocoanut, 142. 

Oil, Cod Liver, 143. 
Oil, Corn, 154. 

Oil, Cotton Seed, 135. 
Oil, Date Stone, 167. 
Oil, Hazel Nut, 297. 

Oil of Juniper, 334. 

Oil, Lamp, 343. 

Oil of Lavender, 347. 
Oil of Lemons, 350. 
Oil, Lilac, 357. 

Oil, Linseed, 359. 

Oil, Lubricating, 456. 
Oil of Mace, 422. 

Oil of Mint, 396. 

Oil, Orange, 429. 

Oil, Peanut, 448. 

Oil of Pennyroyal, 453. 


Oil of Rosemary, 521. 

Oil, Sandal Wood, 530. 

Oil of Sassafras, 532. 

Oil Stone, 304. 

Oil of Turpentine, 624. 

Oil of Vitriol, 600, 636. 

Oil, Walnut, 638. 

Oil Wells, 456. 

Oil, Whale, 648. 

Oil o f Wintergreen, 652. 
Old Wife Duck, 192. 

Oleine, 425. 

Olive, 426. 

Olive Oil, 425, 426. 

Olives, Pickled, 426. 
Olympic Games, Myrtle at, 
415- 

Omnibus, 112, 115. 

Onion, 426. 

Onyx, 3. 

Opal, 427. 

Opium, 427. 

Opossum, 379, 427. 

Optic Nerve, 223. 

Orange, 429. 

Orange Marmalade, 3S8. 
Orang-Outang, 24. 

Orbit of Moon, 405. 

Orbit of Planets, 631. 
Orchestra, 429. 

Ore, Iron, 327. 

Ore, Lead, 347. 

Ore, Silver, 563. 

Oreide, 86. 

Organ, 430. 

Organ, Largest in the 
World, 433. 

Organs, Plant and Animal, 
516. « 

Organic Rocks, 516. 
Oriental Alabaster, 7. 
Oriental Emerald, 2i3. 
Oriental Ruby, 523. 

Oriental Stones, Meaning 
of, 531- 

Oriental Topaz, 619. 

Oriole, Baltimore, 37. 
Orloff Diamond, 172. 

Orloff Trotter, 311. 
Ornamental Castings, 391. 
Ornaments, Bronze, 90. 
Ornaments, Firefly, 235. 
Ornaments, Lava, 347. 
Ornaments, Shell, 549. 
Orris Root, 433. 
Orthoptera, 326. 

Ostrfch, 434. 

Ostrich Feathers, 227. 
Otter, 378, 435. 

Otto of Rose, 521. 

Outcrop, 139. 

Out-Riggers, Boat, 523. 
Ovary of Flowers, 248. 
Ovens, Coke, 146. 
Overhand Knot, 339. 
Overshot Wheel, 643. 


Oviparous, Meaning of. 

5 io, 324 - 
Owl, 435. 

Owl, Eyes of, 223. 

Owl Moth, 408. 

Oxalic Acid, 1. 

Oxeye Daisy, 166. 

Oxide, 43/. 

Oxygen, 437. 

Oxygen, Union with, 232. 
Oxygen in Water, 641. 
Oxy-hydrogen Blowpipe, 
78. 

Oyster, 437. 

Oyster Crab, 157. 

Oyster, Eggs of, 207. 
Oyster, Plammer, 549. 
Oyster, Pearl, 449. 

Oysters Eaten by Star Fish, 

585. 

Oysters in Months without 
an R, 438. 

Oysters, Scalloped, 536. 

PACHYDERMATA, 379 - 
Paint, 439. 

Paint Brushes, 91. 

Painter, 440. 

Painting Porcelain, 486. 
Palace of Ice, Russian, 320. 
Palissy, Bernard, 487. 

Palm Cabbage, 167. 

Palm, Cocoanut, 141. 

Palm, Date, 167. 

Palm, Doum, 268. 

Palm, Ivory, 330. 
Palm-Leaf Fans, 226. 

Palm, Rattan, 507. 

Palm, Sago, 527. 

Palm, Wax, 644. 

Palm Wine, 141, 167. 
Palmetto, 439. 

Palmitine, 425. 

Palpi, 324, 326. 

Pampas of South America, 
307 - 

Panama Hats, 597. 

Pans, Vacuum, 599. 
Pantheon, Dome of, 187. 
Panther, 377, 44c. 

Papaw, 440. 

Paper, 43, 440. 

Paper, Emery, 218. 

Paper Hangings, 443. 

Paper Hangings, Poison¬ 
ous, 29. 

Paper, India, 410. 

Paper, Jute, 334. 

Paper Making, Curious 
Book on, 443. 

Paper, Manila, 385. 

Paper Mulberry, 410. 

Paper Nautilus, 402. 

Paper, Photograph, 460. 
Paper Rags, 501. 

Paper, Rice, 511. 









PAPER 


CSi 


PLANT 


Paper, Tea, 410. 

Paper, Transfer, 361. 

Paper, Uses of, 442. 

Papier Mache, 185, 443. 
Papier Mache Toys, 620. 
Papyrus, 81, 440. 

Parachute, 36. 

Paraffine, 103, 267, 456. 
Parameros, 308. 

Parasol, 628. 

Parchment, 81, 444. 
Paregoric, 427. 

Parian Marble, 386. 

Paris, Balloons in Siege of, 
37 - 

Paris, Plaster of, 288. 

Paris, Photographs in Siege 
of, 461. 

Parlor Skates, 564. 
Parmesan Cheese, 125. 
Paroquet, 444. 

Parrot, 444. 

Parsley, 445. 

Parsnip, 445. 

Partridge, 284, 497, 445. 
Partridge Berries, 652. 
Passes, Mountain, 92. 
Passing Bell, 61. 

Paste, 445. 

Paste, Italian, 372, 

Paste, Jewelry, 489. 

Paste, Jujube, 334. 

Paste, Porcelain, 486. 

Paste, Pottery, 484. 
Pasteboard, 443. 

Pastils, 321. 

Patd de Foie Gras, 280. 
Patent Leather, 30, 349. 
Paunch, 380. 

Pavement, 445. 

Pavement, Asphalt, 30. 
Pavement of Coal Bed, 516. 
Pawl, 507. 

Pawpaw, 440. 

Pea, 446. 

Peabody-Martini-Henry Ri¬ 
fle, 514. 

Peach, 446. 

Peach Black, 344. 

Peach Brandy, 447. 
Peacock, 447. 

Peanut, 448. 

Pear, 448, 

Pearl, 449. 

Pearl Barley, 44. 

Pearl Buttons, 96. 

Pearl, Mother of, 409. 
Pearlash, 482. 

Pearls, Artificial, 450. 
Pearls, Colored, 450. 

Pearls in Mussels, 414. 
Pearly Nautilus, 402. 

Pearly Shells, 549. 

Peat, 139, 450, 517. 

Pebble in Pitcher, Experi¬ 
ment with, 354. 


Pecan Nut, 302. 

Pedal Organ, 430. 

Pedals, Harp, 294. 

Pedals of Piano, 462. 
Pedestal, 146. 

Perennials, 471. 

Pegs, Shoe, 554. 

Peking, Bells of, 61. 

Pelican, 450. 

Pelt, 264, 348. 

Pen, 451. 

Pen Knives, 339. 

Pencil, 452. 

Pencils, Camel Hair, 100. 
Pencils, Slate, 566, 574. 
Pendulum, 134. 

Pennyroyal, 453. 

Pent Roof, 315. 

Pentelic Marble, 386. 

Pepper, 453. 

Peppergrass, 160. 
Peppermint, 396. 

Perch, 454. 

Percheron Horse, 311. 
Perching Birds, 65. 
Percussion Bullets, 93. 
Percussion Fuse, 555. 
Percussion-Lock Gun, 512. 
Perfume, Ambergris, 14. 
Perfume, Nutmeg as a, 422. 
Perfumes, 454. 

Pergamus, Parchment 
named from, 444. 
Periwinkle, 415. 

Perkins, Jacob, 220. 

Perry, 86, 449. 

Persimmon, 203, 455. 
Perspiration, 298, 565. 
Peruvian Bridges, 89. 

Pesth Suspension Bridges, 
89. 

Petal of Flower, 248. 

Petrel, 68. 

Petrel, Stormy, 285. 
Petroleum, 455. 

Pewter, 456. 

Pewter Toys, 620. 

Phaeton, 113. 

Phasis, River, Pheasant. 

named from, 457. 
Pheasant, 284 457. 

Phoenician Alphabet, 659. 
Phoenician Glass, 274. 
Phoenician Pottery, 486. 
Pholas, 399. 

Phone, 6x2. 

Phonograph, 457. 
Phosphides, 459. 
Phosphorescence, 17, 333, 
460. 

Phosphorus, 459. 
Photograph, 460. 
Photographs of Moon, 406. 
Photo-Lithographs, 362. 
Pianoforte, 461. 

Pica Type, 627. 


Piccolo, 249. 

Pickerel, 465. 

Pickled Salmon, 527. 

Pickles, 462. 

Pickles, Bamboo, 38. 

Pickles, Sweet, 389. 

Picture Writing, 658. 

Pie Plant, 510. 

Pig Iron, 327. 

Pig Nut, 302. 

Pigeon, 463. 

Pigeon Hawk, 296. 

Pigs, Lead, 347. 

Pike, 465. 

Pikemen, 50. 

Pilchard, 531. 

Pile, 465. 

Pile Cloths, 137. 

Piles, 313, 

Pilgrims and Scallops, 536. 
Pillar of Noss, The, 205. 
Pillow Lace, 341. 

Pillows, 54. 

Pilot Cloth, 656. 

Pilot Knob, 327. 

Pimento Tree, 10. 

Pin, 465. 

Pin Money, 466. 

Pincers, 466. 

Pinchbeck, 86. 

Pine, 467. 

Pine Marten, 3S8. 

Pine Squirrel, 582. 
Pineapple, 467. 

Pineapple Melon. 389. 
Pindal, 448. 

Pinion of Wheel, 133. 
Pinna, Beard of the, 400. 
Pinnace, 522. 

Pinnated Grouse, 284. 
Pintado, 284. 

Pipe, 468. 

Pipe Clay, 133. 

Pipe, Lead, 348. 

Pipers, Highland, 36. 

Pipes, Organ, 433. 

Pipes in Organ, Groups of, 
430. , ' 

Pirates’ Flag, 243. 

Pistil of Flowers, 248. 

Pistol, 469. 

Piston of Engine, 589. 

Pitch, 606. 

Pitchers, 485. 

Pith-Balls, Elder, 208. 

Pitt Diamond, 172. 

Placers, Gold, 277. 

Plane, 469. 

Plane Tree, 470. 

Planer, Type, 490. 

Planets, 629. 

Planets, Motions of the, 
631. 

Plant Lice, 19. 

Plant, Soap, 573. 

Plant, Tea, 606. 







PLANT 


C82 


QUARTZ SAND 


Plant, Tobacco, 618. 
Plantain, 38, 

Plants, 4, 470, 582. 

Plants for Aquaria, 25, 26 
Plants, Classification of, 477. 
Plants, Coal, 138, 517. 

Plants in Rocks, 516. 

Plants, Uses of, 477. 

Plants, Yeast, 660. 

Plaster Busts, 586. 

Plaster, Isinglass, 330. 
Plaster of Paris, 288. 

Plate Electrical Machine, 
211. 

Plate, Electro, 392. 

Plate Engraving, 219. 

Plate Glass, 273. 

Plate, House, 315. 

Plate, Making Silver, 392, 
Plate, Pewter, 456. 

Platen of Printing Press, 
490 - 

Plates, 485. 

Plates, Bank Note, 43. 
Plates, Electrotype, 492. 
Plates, Iron, 329. 

Plates, Stereotype, 492. 
Platform Scales, 534. 
Platinum, 478. 

Plating, Electro, 393. 
Playing Cards, 109. 

Pliers, 466, 467, 

Plinth, 146. 

Plough, 478. 

Plough, ice, 320. 

Plover, 479. 

Plum, 479. 

Plum, Quetsche, 493. 
Plumbago, 72. 

Plumes, Officers’, 558. 
Plumes, Ostrich, 434. 
Plumule of Feather, 227. 
Plumule of Plant, 475. 
Plumule of Seed, 543. 

Plush, 634, 

Pockets, Gold, 277. 

Pod Fruits, 262. 

Poet Laureate, 346. 

Pointer, 181. 

Point Laces, 341. 

Poison Hemlock, 300. 
Poison Ivy, 331, 600. 

Poison,-Snake, 570. 

Pokel, William, 463. 

Poland Fowls, 255. 

Polar Bear, 51. 

Pole Plate, House, 315. 
Polecat, 378, 479. 

Poles, The, 197. 

Poles of Magnet, 374. 

Poles, Telegraph, 607. 
Polish Swans, 603. 

Polishing Paste, 445. 

Pollen Collected by Humble 
Bees, 317. 

Pollen of Flowers, 56, 248. 


Polyps, Coral, 151. 
Pomatum, 646. 
Pomegranate, 479. 

Pommel of Saddle, 525. 
Ponies, 311. 

Pontoon Bridges, 89. 

Poodle, 184. 

Pop-Corn, 153. 

Pop Guns, Elder, 208. 

Pope Innocent VIII., 77. 
Poplar, 480. 

Poplin, 656. 

Poppy, Opium, 427. 
Porcelain, 483. 

Porcelain Clay, 134. 
Porcelain, Manufacture of, 
486. 

Porcelain Shells, 549. 
Porcelain Stoves, 596. 
Porcupine, 379, 480. 

Pores of Leaves, 473. 

Pores, Skin, 565. 

Porgy, 538. 

Pork Packing, 304. 

Porpoise, 380, 481. 

Porridge, Oat Meal, 424. 
Portable Forge, 253. 
Portland Cement, 122. 
Portland Stone, 531. 

Positive Electricity, 209,356. 
Positive, Photographic, 460. 
’Possum, To Play, 428. 

Post, House, 315. 

Postage Stamps, Gum on, 
286. 

Potash, 481. 

Potash, Prussiate of, 305. 
Potassium, 482. 

Potato, 482. 

Potato Onion, 426. 

Potato Starch, 584. 

Potato, Sweet, 603. 

Pots, Lobster, 364. 

Potters’ Clay, 133. 

Potters’ Wheel, 484. 

Pottery, 483. 

Pottery, History of, 4S6. 
Poulpe, 401. 

Pounce, 164. 

Pouncing Hats, 295. 

Pouter Pigeon, 463. 

Powder, Shoe, 574. 
Pozzuolana, 122. 

Porcelain Pipes, 469. 

Prairie Fox, 258. 

Prairie Hen, 284. 

Prairie Rose, 521. 

Prairie Wolf, 654. 

Precious Stones, 488. 
Precious Stones, False, 445. 
Prescott, William II., Eyes 
of, 224. 

Preserves, Bamboo, 38. 
Press, Hydrostatic, 643. 
Press, Printing, 490 
Press, Wine, 651. 


Presscake, Gunpowder, 287. 
Pressing, Glass, 272. 
Pressure, Stone Made by, 
515 - 

Prey, Birds of, 65. 

Prickly Pear, 98. 

Printing, 489. 

Printing Books, 82. 

Printing Calico, 98. 

Printing Ink, 323. 

Printing Press, 490. 

Prism, 354. 

Prisms, Making Glass, 272. 
Proboscis of Bees, 56. 
Proboscis of Elephant, 215. 
Proboscis of Fly, 250. 
Proboscis of Insects, 324. 
Proboscis Monkey, 403. 
Proboscis of Mosquito, 407. 
Prong Horn Antelope, 23. 
Proof, Printers’, 490. 
Provence Rose, 521. 

Prune, 493. 

Prussian Blue, 305. 

Prussic Acid, 1, 11. 
Pteropods, 400, 402. 
Publishing Books, 81. 
Pucellas, Glass Makers', 
271. 

Pudding Stone, 515, 530. 
Puddling Iron, 328. 

Pulka, Lapland, 508, 567. 
Pulp, Paper, 441. 

Pulque, 4. 

Puma, 156. 

Pumice, 493. 

Pump, 493. 

Pump Drill, 190. 

Pumpkin, 495. 

Punch Pliers, 466, 467. 
Punt, 522. 

Punty, Glass, 84, 271. 

Pupa, 120, 325. 

Pupa, Silkworm, 562. 

Pupil of Eye, 222. 

Puppet Valve, 632. 

Purple Ink, 323. 

Purple Martin, 388. 

Purple, Tyrian, 403. 
Putnam and the Wolf, 653. 
Putty, 496. 

Pygmies and Cranes, 153. 
Pyrometer, 615. 

Python, 571. 

QUADRUMANA, 377. 
Quadrupeds, 377. 

Quahaug Clam, 132. 

Quail, 497. 

Quarantine Flag, 243. 
Quarries, Slate, 566. 
Quarries, Soapstone, 574. 
Quarrying Marble, 387. 
Quass, 524. 

Quartz, 497, 559. 

Quartz Sand, 270. 






QUEEN ELIZABETH 


6S3 


ROOTS OF PLANTS 


Queen Elizabeth’s Car¬ 
riage, 112. 

Queen Elizabeth’s Saddle, 
526. 

Queen’s Metal, 457. 
Queen’s Metal Ware, Mak¬ 
ing, 392 - 
Quercitron, 423. 

Quetsche Plum, 493. 
Quicklime, 98, 358. 
Quicksilver, 389. 

Quill Pens, 451. 

Quills, 565. 

Quills, Porcupine, 480, 
Quince, 497. 

Quinine, 44. 

RABBIT, 379, 499. 

Rabbits Hunted with Fer¬ 
rets, 229. 

Raccoon, 378, 500. 

Race of Dam, 166, 

Race Horse, 311. 

Races, Bicycle, 633. 

Races of Mankind, 381. 
Racing Row Boats, 522. 
Racing Watches, 640. 
Radiates, 17. 

Radiation of Heat, 299. 
Radicle of Seed, 543. 
Radish, 500. 

Radius of Arm, 384. 

Raft, 501, 

Rafter, House, 315. 

Rags, 501. 

Rags, Paper, 441. 

Rags, Sugar made from, 
599 - « 

Rails, Railroad, 502. 
Railroad, 501. 

Railroads, Elevated, 503. 
Rain, 505. 

Rain Water, 231, 640, 641. 
Rainbow, 505. 

Raisin, 506. 

Range, Cooking, 596. 
Raptores, 65. 

Rasores, 66. 

Rasp, 230. 

Raspberry, 506. 

Rat, 379, 506. 

Ratchet, 507. 

Rattan, 507. 

Rattlesnake, 570. 

Raw Silk, 560. 

Razorback Whale, 645. 
Razor Shell, 399, 549. 
Razor-Strop Paper, 218. 
Reaumur’s Thermometer, 
615. 

Red Bird, Summer, 605. 
Red Breast, Robin, 514. 

Red Cedar, 122. 

Red Chalk, 123. 

Red Coral, 151. 

Red Deer, Antlers of, 16S. 


Red Gold, 277. 

Red Ink, 140, 323. 

Red Lead, 348. 

Red Pepper, 454. 

Red Sandal Wood, 530. 
Red Sea, Color of Water 
in, 201. 

Red Squirrel, 582. 
Red-Winged Blackbird, 72. 
Reed Bird, 79, 

Reed of Loom, 369. 

Reed Pipes in Organ, 433. 
Reefs, Coral, 150. 

Reflected Light, 353. 
Reflecting Telescope, 613. 
Reflection of Sound, 577, 
Refracting Telescope, 613. 
Refraction of Light, 354. 
Refraction of Light by 
Prism, 355. 

Refraction of Light by 
Lens, 355. 

Regent Diamond, 172. 
Regimental Officers, 557. 
Register, Telegraph, 607, 
609. 

Regulus, 149. 

Reindeer, 508, 

Reindeer, American, 170, 
Reindeer Lichen, 352. 
Reins, Driving, 293. 
Remington Revolver, 469. 
Remington Rifle, 513. 
Remora, or Sucking Fish, 
240. 

Rennet, 125, 580. 

Rep, 656. 

Repeating Watches, 640. 
Repousse Work, 392. 
Reptile, 509. 

Reptiles, Classification of, 
510. 

Reptiles, Eggs of, 205. 
Resin, Olive, 426. 

Resins, 510. 

Resins, Gum, 286. 

Resins in Varnish, 633. 
Retina of Eye, 222. 

Retorts, Gas, 266. 

Retorts, Iron, 600. 

Retting, 244. 

Reverberatory Furnace,328. 
Revolvers, 469. 

Rhine, Rafts on the, 501. 
Rhine Wine, 651. 
Rhinoceros, 379. 

Rhubarb, 510. 

Ribbon, 510. 

Ribs, Human, 382. 

Rice, 511. 

Rice Bird, 79. 

Rice Paper, 440. 

Ridge Pole, 315. 

Rifle, 511, 512. 

Rifled Cannon, 105. 

Rifles, Emery, 304. 


Right Whale, 645. 

Riiievo, 174, 

Ring Plover, 479. 

Rings in Wood cf Trees, 
475 - 

Rippling, 244. 

River Water, 640. 

Roach, 166. 

Robber Crab, 157. 

Robes, Aztec Feather, 227. 
Robin, 514. 

Robin, American, 514. 
Robins and Wren, Story of, 
658. 

Rockaway, 113. 

Rochelle Powders, 574. 
Rock Bass, 48. 

Rock Blasting, 622. 

Rock Candy, 104. 

Rock Crystal, 497, 330. 
Rock Dove, 463. 

Rock Island Bridge, 89. 
Rock Moss, 352. 

Rock Oil, 455. 

Rock Salt, 528. 

Rock Snake, 571. 

Rock Tripe, 352. 

Rocket, 236, 237. 

Rocket, Locomotive, 503. 
Rocks, 514, 

Rocks Bored by Mollusks, 
„ 399 - 

Rocks, Changes in, 519. 
Rocks, Classification of, 
518. 

Rocks Reddened by Iron, 
3 2 7 - 

Rocky Mountain Goat, 23. 
Rodentia, 378. 

Rodman Gun, 107. 

Rods, Lightning, 357. 

Roe of Fishes, 206. 

Roe, Shad, 547. 

Roe, Sturgeon, 598. 

Rolling Metal, 392. 

Rolling Stock, Railroad, 
503 - 

Roman Alphabet, 659. 
Roman Baths, 49. 

Roman Bricks, 88. 

Roman Bridges, 88. 

Roman Cement, 122. 
Roman Candles, 236. 
Roman Glass, 274. 

Rome, Hippopotamus in, 
303 - 

Roman Letters, ix. 

Rome, Lions in, 360. 

Roman Mosaic, 407. 

Roman Pearls, 450. 

Rome, Tiger in, 617. 

Roof, 315. 

Roofs, Kinds of, 315, 316. 
Root Beer, 59. 

Root Stock, 474. 

Roots of Plants, 474. 






ROPE 


684 


SEEDS 


Rope, 520. 

Rope Cables, 97. 

Roquefort Cheese, 125. 
Rorqual Whale, 645, 

Rose, 521. 

Rose Diamond, 172. 

Rose Water, 521. 
Rosemary, 521. 

Rosewood, 522. 

Rosse’s, Lord, Telescope, 
613. 

Rosso Antico Marble, 336. 
Rouge, 140, 526. 

Rough Wall, 314. 

Round Shot, Casting, 555. 
Row-Boat, 522. 

Rowlocks of Boat, 522, 523. 
Royal Oak, 423. 

Rubble Work, 314. 

Rubrics, 323. 

Ruby, 523. 

Ruffed Grouse, 284. 

Ruling Machine, 221. 

Rum, 523.. 

Ruminantia, 379. 

Runt Pigeon, 464. 

Rush, 523. 

Russ Pavement, 446. 

Russia Leather, 62, 349. 
Russian Bath, 49. 

Russian Sleighs, 567. 

Rust, 263, 437. 

Rust, Iron, 329. 

Rust, Lead, 347. 

Rusting, 232. 

Ruta-Baga, 624. 

Rye, 523. 

Rye Bread, 87. 

SABLE, 378, 525. 

Sable, American, 388, 395. 
Sable, River, 413. 

Sabot, Shell, 555. 

Sabots, 57. 

Sachet Powders, 415 
Sacking, 620. 

Saddle, 525. 

Saddle of Harness, 294. 
Saddle Horse, 311. 

Saddle, Reindeer under, 
508. 

Safe, 526. 

Safety Lamp, 343. 

Safety Matches, 389. 

Safety Valve, 5S8, 632. 
Safflower, 526. 

Saffron, 526, 527. 

Sage, 527. 

Sago, 527. 

Sahara, Hawking in Desert 
of, 225. 

Sail Cloth, 108. 

Sailor’s Knot, 340. 

Sails of Schooner, 553, 
Sails of Ship, 551. 

Saint Bernard Dog, 179. 


Saint Bernard Pass, Snow 
in, 573- 

Saint Gothard Railroad 
Tunnel, 622. 

Saint Hubert’s Hounds, 
180. 

Saint Louis Bridge, 89. 
Saki, 511. 

Saki Monkey, 403. 
Saleratus, 482, 

Salmon, 527. 

Salmon, Speed of, 239. 

Salt, 528. 

Salt in Food, 252. 

Salt of Lemons, 350. 

Salt in the Ocean, 201. 

Salt, Spilling, 529. 
Salt-Water Perch, 454. 
Saltpetre, 529. 

Saltpetre, Chili, 421, 575. 
Salts, 529. 

Salts, Earthy, 473. 

Salts, Epsom, 373. 

Salts, Glauber, 575. 

Salts, Rochelle, 574. 

Samp, 153. 

Sand, 515, 529. 

Sand Blast, 529. 

Sand, Casting in, 391. 

Sand Eel, 203, 

Sand Eels Hunted by Por¬ 
poises, 481. 

Sand Hill Crane, 158. 

Sand Martin, 68. 

Sand, Quartz, 270. 

Sand, Shell, 550. 

Sand Wasp, 639. 

Sandal Wood, 530. 

Sanders Wood, 530. 
Sandpaper, 530. 

Sandstone, 515, 530. 

Sap of Plants, 472. 

Sap Wood, 475. 

Sapphire, 531. 

Saracen Wheat, 91. 
Sardine,-531. 

Sardonyx, 3. 

Sargasso Sea, 542. 
Sarsaparilla, 532. 

Sassafras, 532. 

Satellite, 404, 629. 

Satin, 137. 

Satin Spar, 288. 

Satin Wall Paper, 443. 
Saturn, Planet, 629. 

Sauce, Anchovy, 15. 
Savings Bank, 42. 

Savoy, 97. 

Saw, 532. 

Saw-Dust a Non-Conduc¬ 
tor of Heat, 320. 
Saw-Dust Sugar, 599. 
Saw-Dust, Why Put into 
Ice-Houses. 320. 

Sax Horn, 305. 

Scale, Thermometer, 614. 


Scales, 533, 536. 

Scales, Platform, 534. 
Scales of the Skin, 564. 
Scallop, 536. 

Scansores, 66 . 

Scarabcei, 60. 

Scarecrow, 161. 

Scarlet Tanager, 605. 
Scavenger Beetles, 60. 
Schenk Bier, 59. 

Schiedam Schnapps, 268. 
Schnapps, 268. 

School Slates, 566. 
Schooner, 552, 553. 

Scion, 281. 

Scissors, 536. 

Scissors, Endless, 537. 
Scoop Net, 420. 

Scotch Cambric, 99. 

Scotch Terrier, 183. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 180. 
Scraper, Engraving, 220. 
Scratching Birds, 66. 

Screw, 538. 

Screw-Bolt, 80. 

Screw Dock, 177. 

Sculls, Boat, 522. 

Scup, 538. 

Scuppaug, 538. 

Scutching, 2.44. 

Scythe, 538. 

Scythe Snath, 539. 

Sea Bass, 48. 

Sea Bathing, 50. 

Sea Beat, 59. 

Sea Birds’ Nest, 67. 

Sea Grapes, 401. 

Sea Otter, 435. 

Sea Purses, 206. 

Sea Water, 641. 

Sea Water, Gold in, 277. 
Sea Water Salt, 523. 

Sea Water, Taste of, 201. 
Seabright Bantams, 255. 
Seal, 51, 540. 

Seal Rock, San Francisco, 
54i- . 

Seal Skin, 350. 

Sealing Wax, 541. 

Seals, 378. 

Seams, Coal, 517. 

Seasons, Changes of the, 
199 - 

Seaweeds, 542. 

Seaweeds, Preserving, 543. 
Seckel Pear, 448. 

Section, 515. 

Sedimentary Rocks, 514. 
Seed, 543. 

Seed, Cotton, 155. 

Seed Holders of Ferns, 228. 
Seed Lac, 341. 

Seed-Leaf, 543, 544. 

Seed Oysters, 438. 

Seed Pearls, 449. 

Seeds, 473. 






SEEDS 


685 


SMELLING SALTS 


Seeds, How Scattered, 544. 
Seggar, 485. 

Seine, 373. 420. 

Selenite, 288. 

Sernola, 372. 

Sennal, Fish, 240. 

Senegal, 286. 

Senses of Birds, 64. 

Senses of Fishes, 240. 
Senses of the Horse, 307. 
Senses of Insects, 325. 
Senses of Man, 419. 

Senses of Reptiles, 510. 
Sensory Nerves, 420. 

Sepal of Flower, 248. 

Sepia, 165, 439. 

Serge, 656. 

Serpents, 568. 

Serpents, Eggs of, 205. 
Setter, 181. 

Sevres Porcelain, 486, 487. 
Sewers Poison Water, 640. 
Sewing Books, 82. 

Sewing Machine, 545, 
Sexton Beetles, 60. 

Shad, 547. 

Shaddock, 547. 

Shaft of Column, 146. 

Shaft of Feather, 226. 

Shaft in Mines, 139. 

Shaft Tug of Harness, 294. 
Shag-Bark Hickory, 302. 
Shagreen, 547. 

Shale, 515. 

Shallot, 427. 

Shammy Leather, 22, 91. 
Shanghai Fowls, 255. 
Share, Plough, 478. 

Shark, 547. 

Shark, Egg of, 206. 

Sharp Rifle, 514. 

Shawls, Camel Hair, 100. 
Shawls, Cashmere, 1x6,270. 
Sheaf, 539. 

Shear Steel, 591. 

Shears, 536. 

Sheathing Copper, 149. 
Sheave, 73. 

Shed Roof, 315. 

Shed in Weaving, 368. 
Sheep, 380. 

Sheep Shears, 537. 

Sheep Skin, 350. 

Sheep, Stomach of, 380. 
Sheet Glass, 273. 

Sheet Lead, 347. 

Sheet Lightning, 357- 
Shell, 555. 

Shell Animalcules, 18, 
Shell-Bark Hickory, 302. 
Shell, Electrotype, 394, 493. 
Shell Gun, 105. 

Shell, Hat, 295. 

Shell Lac, 341. 

Shell of Lobster, 364. 

Shell of Oyster, 438. 


Shells, 402, 549. 

Shells for Buttons, 96. 
Shells of Crustaceans, 162. 
Shells in Rocks, 517. 

Shells, Rowing, 522. 
Shelties, 312. 

Shepherd Dog, 184. 
Shetland Pony, 311. 
Shingle, 550. 

Ship, 550. 

Ship Worm, 553. 

Shoat, 304. 

Shock, Electric, 212. 

Shoe, 554. 

Shoe Nails, 416. 

Shoes, Wooden, 57. 
Short-Horn Cattle, 121. 
Short-Staple Cotton, 154. 
Short-Staple Wool, 655. 
Shot, 554. 

Shot, Casting, 555. 

Shot Towers, 554. 

Shoulder Blade, 384. 
Shoulder of Knife, 338. 
Shoulder Loops, 559. 
Shoulder Straps, 556. 
Shrapnel, Colonel, 556. 
Shrapnel Shot, 555. 

Shrew Mole, 398. 

Shrimp, 559. 

Shroud Hawser-Laid Rope, 
521. 

Shrub, 471. 

Shuttle of Loom, 368. 
Shuttle, Sewing Machine, 
545- 

Siam, Umbrellas of King 
of, 628. 

Siberian Reindeer, 508. 
Sickle, 538. 

Sickness from Impure Wa¬ 
ter, 231. 

Siderite, 327. 

Side Saddle, 526. 

Siena Earth, 439. 

Silica, 270, 559. 

Silicates, 560. 

Silicon, 559. 

Silk, 560. 

Silk Hats, 296. 

Silk, Jute Mixed with, 334. 
Silk of Mollusks, 399. 

Silk Plush, 296. 

Silk, Virginia, 395. 
Silkworm, 560. 

Silkworm, Eggs of, 207. 
Sill, House, 3x4, 315- 
Silver, 563. 

Silver Dace, 166. 

Silver Fir, 232. 

Silver Filigree, Chinese, 
230. 

Silver, German, 421. 

Silver Leaf, 279. 

Silver Maple, 386. 

Silver Mirrors, 396. 


Silver Plate, Making, 392. 
Silvery Gull, 285. 

Simoom, 650. 

Singer Sewing Machine, 
545- 

Singing Fish, 240. 

Singing Mouse, 410. 

Sinnet, 142. 

Siphon, 563. 

Siphon Barometer, 45. 
Sitting of Fowls, 256. 
Six-Penny Nails, Meaning 
of, 416. 

Size, 268, 425. 

Size for Gilding, 279. 

Size, Paper Hangers’, 275. 
Sizes of Books, 81. 

Sizing Hats, 295. 

Sizing, Paper, 441. 

Skate, 564. 

Skeleton of the Horse, 308. 
Skeleton ot Man, 382. 
Skeleton of Snake, 569. 
Skeleton of Turtle, 509, 625. 
Skiff, 522. 

Skim Milk, 395. 

Skin, 564. 

Skin of Animals, 348. 

Skin Bottles, 83. 

Skin, Cats’, 118. 

Skin, Goat, 276. 

Skin, Gold-Beaters’, 279. 
Skin, Hog, Uses ot, 304. 
Skin, Seal, 540. 

Skin, Shark, 548. 

Skin of Snakes, 568. 

Skin of Whale, 645. 

Skins, 264. 

Skipjack, 78. 

Skull, Human, 383. 

Skunk, 378, 566. 

Sky Lark, 344. 

Sky Rockets, 236, 237. 

Slag, 328. 

Slag, Iron, 347. 

Slate, 566. 

Slate Pencils, 453. 

Slave Ships and Sharks, 
548 - 

Sled, 567. 

Sledge, 567. 

Sledge Dogs, 178. 

Sledge, Reindeer, 508. 
Sledge, Siberian, 509. 
Sledges, Whalebone, 647. 
Sleigh, 567. 

Slide Valve, 589, 632. 

Slip, Pottery, 484. 

Slippery Elm, 218. 

Sloop, 553. 

Sloth, 379. 

Small Capital Letters, 626. 
Small-Pica Type, 627. 
Smalt, 140. 

Smalts, 407. 

Smelling Salts, 14. 





SMELT 


686 


STAYSAILS 


Smelt, 567. 

Smelting Iron Ore, 327. 
Smelting Lead, 347. 

Smith & Wesson Revolver, 
469. 

Smith’s Brace, 191. 

Smoke Tree, 600. 

Smoke, Why it Goes up 
Chimney, 127. 

Smoked Beef, 58. 

Smoking, Indians, 618. 
Smoking Tobacco, 618. 
Smoothing Plane, 470. 
Smut, 263. 

Snaffle Bit, 292. 

Snail, 568. 

Snakes, 568. 

Snake Charmers, Indian, 
571- 

Snapping Turtle, 626. 
Snaps, Ginger, 268. 

Snare Drum, 191. 

Snatch Block, 73. 

Snath, 539. 

Sned, 539. 

Snipe, 571. 

Snow, 572. 

Snow Bird, 126. 

Snow, Colored, 572. 

Snow Line, 202. 

Snow on Mountains, 202. 
Snuff, 619. 

Soap, 573. 

Soap, Castile, 426. 

Soap, Marine, 142. 

Soap, Papaw Leaf, 440. 
Soap, Peanut Oil, 448. 
Soapstone, 573. 

Soapwort, C73. 

Social Weaver Birds, 70. 
Socrates, Death of, 300. 
Soda, 574. 

Soda Nitre, 421. 

Soda Water, 109, 574. 
Sodium, 575. 

Sodium, Chloride of, 129. 
Sodom, Apples of, 265. 
Soft-Shell Crab, 157. 

Soft Soap, 573. 

Soil, How Made, 202. 
Solanine, 483. 

Solar System, 629. 

Solder, 575. 

Soldier Crab, 157. 

Soldiers, British, Red Coats 
of, 341. 

Solferino, Balloons at, 37. 
Solid Defined, 214. 

Solid Type, 490. 

Song of Birds, 64. 

Song of the Dying Swan,603 
Song Sparrow, 577. 

Sound, 575. 

Sound Board of Organ, 431. 
Sound and Light, Speed of, 
353- 


Sound, Speed of, 577. 

Sound Waves, 611. 
Sounding Board of Piano, 
461. 

Sounds and Tongues, Cod, 
143- 

South America, WildHorses 
of, 307. 

Southern Cradle, 540. 

Sow, 304. 

Spaniel, 181. 

Spanish Black, 152, 344. 
Spanish Cat, 117. 

Spanish Cedar, 122, 131. 
Spanish Fly, 60. 

Spanish Lace, 34T. 

Spanish Mackerel, 372. 
Spanish White, 123. 
Spanker, 552. 

Spanners, 119. 

Spar Buoys, 93. 

Spar, Satin, 288. 

Spark, Electrical, 211. 
Spark of Electrical Ma¬ 
chine same as Lightning, 
356 . 

Sparkling Wines, 652. 
Sparrow, 577. 

Sparrow Hawk, 296. 

Spat, Oyster, 438. 

Spawn of Fishes, 206, 240. 
Speaking Trumpet, 622. 
Speaking Tubes, 577. 
Spearmint, 396. 

Spears, Malay, 313. 
Spectacles, 351. 
Spectroscope, 602. 

Spelter, 391. 

Spencer Rifle, 514. 

Spenser, 552. 

Sperm Candles, 646. 

Sperm Whale, 380, 646. 
Spermaceti, 646. 

Spermaceti Candles, 103. 
Spherical Case Shot, 556. 
Spider, 578. 

Spider Monkey, 403. 
Spinach, 580. 

Spinal Canal, 383. 

Spinal Cord, 418. 

Spinet, 461. 

Spinnerets of Spider, 579. 
Spinning, Cotton, 155. 
Spinning Metal, 392. 
Spinning-wheel, 155. 
Spinning-wheel, Rope,520. 
Spinster, 155. 

Spiny Pig, 481. 

Spirits of Camphor, ico. 
Spirits of Lavender, 347. 
Spirits of Turpentine, 624. 
Spitz Dog, 178. 

Splints, 47. 

Splints, Gutta-Percha, 287. 
Sponge, 17, 27, 580. 

Spool, 79. 


Spoon Oars, 523. 

Spoons, Making, 392. 
Spores of Ferns, 228. 

Spots on the Sun, 601. 
Spotted Hyena, 318. 

Spring Balance. 535. 

Spring Beetle, 60. 

Spring Lock, 365. 

Spring Wheat, 648. 
Springfield Rifle, 513. 
Springfield Rifle Ball, 93. 
Springs, Salt, 528. 

Springs, Water in, 641. 
Spruce, 581. 

Spruce, Hemlock, 300. 

Spy-glass, 612. 
Square-Rigged Vessel, 551. 
Squash, 581. 

Squaw Berries, 652. 
Squeezers, Iron, 329. 
Squeteague, 644. 

Squid, 401. 

Squirrel, 581. 

Squirrel, Flying, 251. 
Squirrel, Ground, 127. 
Squirrels, 379. 

Squirting Cucumber, 163. 
Stag, Antlers of, 168. 
Stage-coach, 112. 
Staghound, 181. 

Stained Glass, 274. 

Stains on Walls, 352. 
Stallion, 307. 

Stamens of Flowers, 248. 
Stamping Metal, 392. 

Staple of Lock, 365. 

Staple, Meaning of, 536. 
Standards, 242. 

Standards, Fan, 226. 

Star Fish, 584. 

Star of the South Diamond, 
173- 

Starch, 584. 

Starch, Corn, 154. 

Starch in Food, 252. 

Starch in Plants, 473. 

Starch, Rice, 511. 

Starch, Sugar made from, 
599- 

Starling, 72. 

Star-nosed Mole, 398. 

Stars, 582. 

Stars, Distance of the, 629. 
Stars, Falling, 629. 

Stars, Magnitude of, 583. 
Stars, Movement of the, 
197. 

Starucca Viaduct, Erie 
Railway, 88. 

State, Umbrella of, 628. 
Statera, Roman, 533. 

Statue, 585. 

Statues, Greek, 386. 

Statues, Metal, 391. 

Staves, 46. 

Staysails, 552. 









STEAM 


687 


TARPAN 


Steam, 587. 

Steam Engine, 588. 

Steam Heater, 597. 

Steam Plough, 478. 

Steam, Strength of, 5S8. 
Stearine, 425. 

Stearine Candles, 103, 142. 
Steel, 591. 

Steel Engravers’ Tools, 220. 
Steel Engraving, 220. 

Steel Pens, 451. 

Steel, Softening, 220. 

Steel Wire, 653. 

Steelyard, 533, 536. 

Stem of Plants, 474. 
Stem-winding Watches, 
640. 

Stencil Plate, 591. 
Stephenson, George, 503. 
Stereoscope, 592. 

Stereotype Plates, 492. 
Sterlet, 598. 

Sternum, Human, 382, 
Stewart Diamond, 174. 
Stick, Composing, 489. 
Stick Lac, 341. 

Sticks, Emery, 218. 

Sticks, Liquorice, 361. 
Stigma of Flowers, 248. 
Still, 8. 

Still Wines, 652. 

Stilts, 593. 

Stilts, Plough, 478. 

Sting of Bee, 55. 

Sting of Mosquito, 408. 
Stipple Engraving, 220. 
Stirabout, 153. 

Stirrups, 525, 526. 

Stock, 281. 

Stocking, 593. 

Stolon, Plant, 476. 

Stomach, 593. 

Stomach of Camel, 100. 
Stomach of Ruminants, 380. 
Stone Age, 90. 

Stone Fruits, 261. 

Stone Hammers, 290. 

Stone, Imposing, 490. 

Stone Knives, 338. 

Stone, Tin. 617. 

Stones in Brooks, 515. 
Stoneware, 483. 

Stops of Organ, 432. 

Stories. (See Anecdotes and 
Illustrations. 

Storm, Great Hail, 289. 
Storms, Great Snow, 572. 
Stormy Petrel, 285. 

Stove, 596. 

Strasburg Cathedral Clock, 
136. 

Strasburg Pies, 280. 
Strasburg Turpentine, 624. 
Strass, 44S, 489. 

Stratified Rocks, 515. 
Stratum, 515. 


Stratus Clouds, 138. 

Straw, 597. 

Straw Paper, 441. 

Straw, Rye, 524. 

Straw Shoes, 554. 

Straw, Wheat, 648. 

Straw, why Used in Ice¬ 
houses, 320. 

Strawberry, 597. 

Strength of Animals, 412. 
Strength of Insects, 325. 
Strength of Tiger, 616. 
Stretchers in Masonry, 314. 
Strings of Pianoforte, 461. 
Striped Bass, 40. 

Striped Hyena, 318. 

Striped Squirrel, 127. 

Struts in House Frame, 

3 15 ’ „ 

Studs, House, 315. 

Studs, Window, 315. 
Studding Sails, 552. 

Stuff Goods, 656. 

Stupid as an Ostrich, 434. 
Sturgeon, 598. 

Sturgeon Isinglass, 330. 
Style of Flowers, 248. 
Subsoil Plough, 478. 
Succory, 126. 

Succotash, 153. 

Sucker, 598. 

Sucker, Toy, 6. 

Suckers, Plant, 476. 

Sucking Fish, 240. 

Suction Pump, 494. 
Suctoria, 657. 

Suffolk Horse, 3x1. 

Sugar, 598. 

Sugar, Beet, 59. 

Sugar in Food, 252. 

Sugar, Grape, 58. 

Sugar of Lead, 348. 

Sugar, Maple, 385. 

Sugar Pine, 467. 

Sugar Plums, 104. 

Sugar Refining, 599. 

Sulky, 113, 1x6. 

Sulphates, 600. 

Sulphides, 600. 

Sulphur, 600. 

Sulphuric Acid, 6co. 
Sultana Raisins, 506. 
Sumach, 600. 

Summer Red Bird, 605. 
Sun, 601. 

Sun Bird, 317. 

Sun Dial, 134. 

Sun, Distance from the 
Earth of, 630. 

Sun, Heat of the, 297. 
Sunflower, 249. 
Superstructure, Railroad, 
502. 

Surinam Opossum, 428. 
Suspension Bridges, 89. 
Survey of Railroad, 50X. 


Swallow, 602. 

Swallow, Cliff, 68. 
Swallowing Food, 594. 
Swallow-tail Butterfly, 94. 
Swallow-tailed Kite, 336. 
Swamp Maple, 386. 

Swamp Rose, 521. 

Swan, 602. 

Swarm of Bees, 56. 

Sweet Bay Magnolia, 376. 
Sweet Bay Laurel, 346. 
Sweet Flag, 603. 

Sweet Lemon, 350. 

Sweet Marjoram, 388. 
Sweet Pea, 446. 

Sweet Potato, 603. 

Sweet Wines, 652. 

Sweeps, Boat, 522. 

Swell Organ, 430. 

Swift, 602. 

Swimming Birds, 66. 
Switch, Railroad, 503. 
Sword Bayonet, 50. 

Sword Fish, 604. 

Sycamore, 470. 

Syenite, 281, 306. 

Syllables, 659. 

Symbols, 659. 

Syringe Tree, 321. 

Syrup, Lemon, 350. 

Syrup, Sarsaparilla, 532. 
Syrup, Sugar-house, 599. 
Syrups in Candy, 104. 
System, Solar, 629. 

TABLE DIAMOND, 172. 
Table Knives, 338. 
Tacamahac, 480. 

Tackle Block, 73. 
Tadpoles, 14, 259, 618. 
Tailor Bird, 70. 

Tails, Lizards’, 362. 

Talc, 573. 

Tallow, Beef, 425. 

Tallow Candles, 103. 
Tallow Tree, 103. 
Tamarack, 344. 

Tamarind, 605. 
•Tambourine, 605. 

Tanager, 605. 

Tandem, Driving, 113. 
Tang of Knife, 338. 
Tannin, 349, 480. 

Tanning, 349. 

Tap Bolt, 80. 

Tap Root, 474. 

Tape Worm, 657. 

Tapestry Carpets, hi. 
Tapioca, 606. 

Tapir, 379. 

Tappa Cloth, 410. 

Tar, 606. 

Tar, Coal, 267. 

Tar, Gas, 14. 

Taro, 229. 

Tarpan, 308. 





TARPAULIN 


6 SS 


TUBE WELL 


Tarpaulin, 606. 

Tarred Rope, 521. 

Tartar Cheese, 125. 

Tartar, Cream of, 482. 
Tartar Emetic, 23. 

Tartaric Acid, 1. 

Tartary, Wild Horses of, 
308, 310. 

Taste, 594. 

Tautog, 72. 

T Cart, 113. 

Tea, 606. 

Tea Chests, Lead Lining 
of, 348. 

Tea Chests, Packing, 607. 
Tea, Currant, 164. 

Tea Paper, 410. 

Tea, Pennyroyal, 453. 

Tea, Saffron, 527. 

Tea, Sassafras, 532. 

Teal, 192. 

Tears, 223. 

Teasels, 636. 

Teeth, Human, 383. 

Teeth of the Horse, 308. 
Teeth of Mammals, 377. 
Teeth, Saw, 533. 

Teeth of Snakes, 569. 

Teeth, Sperm Whale, 646. 
Telegraph, 607. 

Telephone, 610. 

Telescope, 612. 

Telescope, Moon Seen 
through a, 406. 

Tenacity, Meaning of, 390. 
Tendons, 411. 

Tenon, 407. 

Tension of Sewing Ma¬ 
chine, 545. 

Teredo, 553. 

Tere% Hame, 293. 

Termites, 22. 

Terra Cotta, 483. 

Terrapin, 626. 

Terrestrial Telescope, 612. 
Terricola, 657. 

Terrier, 182. 

Terrier and Lioness, Story 
of, 360. 

Thames Tunnels, 623. 
Theodoric, Hangman at 
Tyburn, 159. 

Theodorus of Abyssinia, 
Lions of, 360. 
Thermometer, 614. 

Thibet Mastiff, 182. 

Thick Enamel, 219. 

Thigh Bone, Human, 384. 
Thimble, 615. 
Thimbleberry, 506. 

Thin Enamel, 218. 

Thistle, Seeds of the, 544. 
Thistle Bird, 660. 

Thole Pins of Boat, 522. 
Thorax, Human, 382. 
Thrasher, Brown, 616. 


Thread, 156, 

Thread, India Rubber, 322. 
Thread, Lace, 341. 

Thread, Linen, 359. 

Thread, Silk, 560. 

Threads, Spider, 579. 
Throttle Valve, 590. 
Throwing, Silk, 560. 
Throwing Wheel, 484. 
Thrush, 616. 

Thurible, 321. 

Thwarts of Boat, 522. 
Thyme, 616. 

Tibia, Human, 384. 

Tie Beam, House, 315. 

Ties, Railroad, 502. 

Tiger, 377, 616. 

Tiger, American, 156. 

Tiger Beetles, 60. 

Tiger, South American, 
332. 

Tigris, Boats on the, 47. 

Tilt Hammer, 291. 

Timber Raft, 501. 

Time Flower, 167. 

Time Lock, 366. 

Timothy Grass, 2S2. 

Tin, 617. 

Tin Foil, 251. 

Tin Pans, Making, 392. 

Tin Toys, 620. 

Tin Tubes, Paints in, 439. 
Tin Ware, 618. 

Tires on Wheels, 299. 
Tissue, Plant, 471. 

Toad, 618. 

Toads, Eggs of, 205. 
Tobacco, 618. 

Tobacco Pipe, 468. 
Toboggan, Canadian, 567. 
Toddy, 141. 

Toilet Soap, 573. 

Toilet Vinegar, 603. 

Tom Cod, 142. 

Tomahawk, 32. 

Tomato, 619. 

Tombac, 86. 

Tomb Stones Engraved by 
Sand, 530. 

Tongue, 594. 

Tongue of Fly, 250. 

Tongue of Snakes, 569. 
Tooth Brushes, 90. 

Tooth Powder, 415. 

Tools of Wood Engravers, 
219. 

Topaz, 619. 

Topsail Schooner, 553. 
Topsails, 551, 553. 

Tornado, 650. 

Torpedoes, 236. 

Torricelli, Inventor of Ther¬ 
mometer, 614. 

Tortoise, 625, 626. 

Tortoise, Eggs of 205. 
Tortoise Shell, 619. 


Tortoise Shell Cat, 117. 
Tow, 244, 620. 

Town Clocks, 136. 

Tov, Amusing Electrical, 


212. 

Toy Balloons, 37. 

Toy Makers, German and 
Swiss, 620. 

Toys, 620. 

Toys, Ivory, 330. 

Toys, Wooden, 359. 

T Rail, 502. 

Traces of Harness, 293. 
Trachea, Human, 383. 
Trade Winds, 650. 
Tragacanth, Gum, 286. 
Trails, Buffalo, 92. 

Train of Wheels, 135. 
Tramway, 505. 

Transept of Church, 131. 
Transfer Paper, 361. 
Transferring Process, En¬ 
graving, 42. 

Transfusion of Blood, 77. 
Transmitter of Telephone, 
612. 

Trap, Turkey, 623. 

Traps, Tiger, 617. 
Travelling Crane, 159. 
Trawl Net, 420. 

Trawls, 142. » 

Tree, 471. 

Tree Cabbage, 97. 

Tree Ferns, 229. 

Tree Frogs, 260. 

Tree, Gingerbread, 268. 
Tree, Green, at House Rais¬ 
ing, 316. 

Tree Moss, 352. 

Tree of Saddle, 525. 

Tree, Soap, 573. 

Triangle, 621. 

Trinidad. Bitumen Lake in. 


Trinity Church, New York, 
Clock of, 136. 

Tripe de Roche, 352. 
Troika, Russian, 567. 
Trombone, 621. 

Trotting Horse, 311. 

Trout, 621. 

Trout Pickerel, 465. 

Trowel Bayonet, 50. 

Truce, Flag of, 243. 

Truck, American Railroad, 
504- 

Truffle, 263. 

Trumpet, 622. 

Trumpeter Pigeon, 464. 
Trunk of Elephant, 215. 
Trunk, Human, 382. 

Truss, King, 315. 

Truss, Queen, 315. 

Trying Plane, 470. 

Tsetse Fly, 250. 

Tube Well, 645. 






TUBERS 


689 


WATER 


Tubers of Potato, 482. 
Tubers of Ssveet Potato, 
604. 

Tubicola, 656. 

Tubular Bridges, 89. 

Tufa, 518. 

Tumble Bugs, 60. 

Tumbler Lock, 365. 
Tumbler Pigeon, 463. 
Tumblers, 408. 

Tunnel, 622. 

Tunnel, Railroad, 502. 
Tunny Fish, Crying of, 240. 
Turbine, 643. 

Turkey, 623. 

Turkey Buzzard, 637. 
Turkey Carpets, no. 
Turkey Red, 373 600. 
Turkey-Wing Cradle, 540. 
Turkish Bath, 49. 

Turmeric, 624. 

Turning Lathe, 343. 

Turnip, 624. 

Turnout, Railroad, 503. 
Turpentine, 624. 
Turpentine, Oil of, 425 
Turquoise, 624. 

Turtle, 625. 

Turtle Dove, 463. 

Turtle, Eggs of, 205. 

Turtle, Skeleton of, 509. 
Tuscan Order, 147. 
Tuscany, Volcanic Moun¬ 
tain in, 83. 

Tusks of Elephant, 216. 
Tuyeres in Furnace, 327, 
347. 

Tweed, 656. 

Twilled Cloth, 137. 
Two-Headed Eagle, 194. 
Tympan of Printing Press, 
491. 

Type, 626. 

Type Making, 627. 

Type Metal, 348. 

Type Setting, 489. 
Typhoon, 650. 

Tyrian Purple, 403. 

ULNA OF ARM, 384. 
Ultramarine, 344. 

Umber, 439. 

Umbrella, 628. 

Undershot Wheel, 643. 
Uniform of Army, 557. 
Uniform of Navy, 559. 
Union Jack, 243. 

United States, Flag of, 243. 
Univalve, 402. 

Univalve Shells, 549. 
Universe, 629. 

Unter den Linden, Street 
in Berlin, 358. 

Upland Plover, 479. 
Uranus, Planet, 629. 

Urine, 77. 

Usquebaugh, 649. 


VACUUM, 614. 

Vacuum made by Light¬ 
ning, 357. 

Vacuum Pans, 599. 

Vacuum, Torricellian, 45. 
Valenciennes Lace, 341. 
Valve, 632. 

Valve Box of Engine, 589. 
Valve, Safety, 588. 

Valve, Slide, 589. 

Vampire, 49. 

Van Amburgh, 617. 

Vane of Feather, 226. 
Vanilla, 632. 

Vapor, 5. 

Vapor of the Ocean, 356. 
Varnish, 633. 

Varnish, Lacquer, 342, 601. 
Varnish, Map, 232. 

Varnish, Mastic, 388. 

Vat, Wine, 651. 

Vegetable Ivory, 330. 
Vegetable Kingdom, 215, 
477- 

Veins, 74. 

Vellum, 444. 

Velocipede, 633. 

Velvet, 634. 

Velvet Wall Paper, 443. 
Velveteen, 634. 

Veneer, 634. 

Veneer, Tortoise Shell, 619. 
Venetian Glass, 275. 
Venetian Sumach, 600. 
Venice Turpentine, 624. 
Venous Blood, 76. 
Ventricles of Heart, 74. 
Venus, Planet, 629. 

Verde Antico Marble, 386. 
Verdigris, 634. 

Verditer, Blue, 150. 
Vermicelli, 372. 

Vermilion, 390. 

Vertebra, 382. 

Vertebra of Man, 16. 
Vertebrates, 15. 

Viaduct, 88. 

Vibration, Meaning of, 575. 
Vice, 635. 

Vice, Hand, 417. 

Victoria, 114. 

Victoria Bridge, 88. 

Vine, 471. 

Vine Black, 344. 

Vinegar, 635. 

Vinegar, Toilet, 603. 

Vino Mezcal, 4. 

Vin Ordinaire, 133. 

Viola, 635. 

Violets, Essence of, 433. 
Violin, 635. 

Violoncello, 635. 

Viper, 570. 

Virgin Honey, 304. 
Virginal, 461. 

Virginia Creeper, 331. 
Virginia Deer, 169. 


Viscera, Human, 382. 
Visiting Cards, no. 
Vitellius, Emperor, Eating 
Oysters, 437. 

Vitriol, 636. 

Vitriol, Blue, 150. 

Vitriol, Oil of, 600. 

Vitriol, White, 661. 
Viviparous, Meaning of, 
376 . 

Vogelberg, The, 67. 

Volatile Oils, 424. 

Volcanic Ashes, 30. 

Voltaic Battery, 213, 375, 
393. 

Vulcanized India Rubber, 
322- 

Vulture, 636. 

WADING BIRDS, 66. 
Wahoo Elm, 218. 

Wall, Building a, 313. 

Wall Paper, 443. 

Wall Plate, 315. 

Wallace, Sir William, 180. 
Walnut, 638. 

Wampum, 132, 549. 

War, Sloop of, 553. 
Warbler, Fan-tailed, 71. 
Wardian Cases, 229. 

Wards of Lock, 365. 

Warp in Cloth, 137. 

War Horse of Knights, 311. 
Warrant, Officer's, 557. 
Washing, Gold, 277. 
Washing Soda, 574. 
Washington Press, 490. 
Wasp, 638. 

Watch. 639. 

Watch Dials, 219. 

Water, 4, 640. 

Water from Burning Hy¬ 
drogen, 318. 

Water Cement, 122. 

Water Colors, 439. 

Water Cress, 160. 

Water, Drop of, 17. 

Water on the Earth, 201. 
Water in Food, 252. 

Water Fowl, Nests of, 67. 
Water, Heating, 587. 

Water Heavier than Ice, 
319- 

Water Hemlock, 300. 
Water Made Larger by 
Freezing, 299. 

Water Marks in Paper, 442. 
Water, Peach, 447. 

Water Presses in Every Di¬ 
rection, 642. 

Water-Proof Clothing, 322. 
Water of Ocean, Color of. 
201. 

Water, Orange Flower, 429. 
Water, Rain, 231. 

Water, Soda, 574. 

Water Seeks its Level, 641. 





WATER 


690 


ZITHER 


Water Spider, 580. 

Water Wheel, 643. 
Watermelon, 389. 

Waves, Sound, 576. 

Wax, 56, 643. 

Wax Candles, 103. 

Wax Casting, 391. 

Wax Dolls, 186. 

Wax in the Ear, 196. 

Wax Matches, 389. 
Weakfish, 644. 

Weasel, 378, 644. 

Weaver Birds, 70. 

Weaving, 369. 

Webb Perfecting Printing 
Press. 492. 

Wedgwood, Josiah, 487. 
Weevil, 60. 

Weft in Cloth, 137. 
Welding, 329, 338. 

Welding Tortoise Shell, 
619. 

Well, 644. 

Wells, Salt, 528. 
Westinghouse Brake, 85. 
Whale, 645. 

Whale Boat, 522. 
Whalebone, 565, 645, 648. 
Wharf, 176. 

Wheat, 648. 

Wheat Bread, 87. 

Wheat Starch, 584. 
Wheaten Grits, 648. 
Wheatfish, 644. 

Wheel, Cog, 135. 

Wheel, Escapement, 136. 
Wheel, Fly, 590. 

Wheel, Potter’s, 484. 
Wheel, Spinning, 155. 
Wheel-lock, Gun, 5x2. 
Wheels, 115. 

Wheels, Train of, 135. 
Wheels, Water, 6^3. 
Wherry, 522. *• 

Whetstone, 304. 

Whey, 125. 

Whippoorwill, 649. 

Whirl, Rope, 520. 

Whisk Brooms, 90. 
Whiskey, 649. 

Whiskey, Bourbon, 154. 
Whitby Jet, 334. 

White Animals, 7. 

White Ants, 22. 

White Coral Powder, 164. 
White Elephant, 7, 217. 
White Elm, 217. 
White-Headed Eagle, 194. 
White Lead, 348. 

White Negroes, 7. 

White Oak, 423. 

White Pepper, 454. 

White Pine, 467 
White Poplar, 480. 

White Sea, Name of, 201. 
White Shark, 547. 

White Vitriol, 636. 


White, Zinc, 661. 
Whiteweed, 166. 

Whiting, 123. 

Whooping Crane, 158. 
Whortleberry, 316. 

Wicker Work, 47. 

Wicks, Lamp, 343. 
Widgeon, 192. 

Wieliczka, Salt Mines of, 
528. 

Wigglers, 408. 

Wigs, Judges’, 276. 

Wild Boar, 303, 379. 

Wild Cat, 117, 371. 

Wild Cattle, 121. 

Wild Cherry, 126. 

Wild Geese, 280. 

Wild Horses, 307. 

Wild Horses, Gaits of, 310. 
Wild Pigeon, 464. 

Wild Turkey, 623. 

Willow, 649. 

Wilson’s Snipe, 571. 

Wilton Carpets, 111. 
Winch, 159, 649, 651. 
Winchester Rifle, 514. 
Wind, 649. 

Wind Chest of Organ, 43T. 
Wind Trunk of Organ, 431. 
Windlass, 85, 649, 651. 
Windmill, 651. 

Window Glass, 273. 
Window Glass in Pompeii, 
275- 

Window Posts, 315. 
Windows, Horn in, 305. 
Windpipe, 594. 

Windpipe, Human, 383. 
Winds, Names of the, 650. 
Wine, 7, 651. 

Wine, Blackberry, 71. 
Wine, Cranberry, 158. 
Wine, Currant, 164. 

Wine, Date, 167. 

Wine, Elder Berry, 208. 
Wine Glass, Making a, 271. 
Wine. Honey, 304. 

Wine, Palm, 141, 167. 
Wine, Walnut, 638. 

Wines, Color of, 652. 
Wings, Insects’, 324. 

Wink, Quick as a, 224. 
Winking, 223. 

Winter Wheat, 648. 
Wintergreen, 652. 

Wire, 652. 

Wire Cables, 521. 

Wires, Telegraph. 607. 
Wolf, 378, 653. 

Wolf, Prairie, 177. 

Wood, Apple Tree, 25. 
Wood, Ash, 29. 

Wood, Beech, 57. 

Wood, Black Walnut, 638. 
Wood, Box, 85. 

Wood, Butternut, 95. 
Wood Charcoal, 125. 


Wood, Cherry, 126. 

Wood, Chestnut, 126. 
Wood, Cypress, 

Wood, Elm, 218. 

Wood Engraving, 219. 
Wood, French Walnut, 638. 
Wood, Hazel, 297. 

Wood, Hickory, 302. 
Wood, Lilac, 358. 

Wood, Linden, 359. 

Wood, Locust, 367. 

Wood, Olive, 426. 

Wood, Orange, 429. 

Wood, Palmetto, 439. 
Wood Paper, 441. 

Wood Pavement, 446. 
Wood, Pear Tree, 449. - 
Wood, Sandal, 530. 

Wood, Tamarind, 605. 
Wood Thrush, 616. 

Wood Tissue, 472. 

Wood Wasp, 639. 
Woodchuck, 654. 
Woodcock, 654. 

Wooden Toys, 620. 
Woodpecker, 654. 

Woof in Cloth, 137. 

Wool, 655. 

Wool, Felting of, 228. 
Woollen Clothes, Why they 
Shrink, 228. 

Woollen Goods, 653. 
Working Beam, 590. 
Worms, 656. 

Worsted Goods, 656 
Wove Paper, 442. 

Wren, 658. 

Wrench, 658. 

Wrist, Bones of, 384. 
Writing, 658. 

Writing Ink, 323. 

Wrought Iron, 328. 
Wrought Metal, 392. 
Wrought Nails, 4x6. 

Wych Elm, 218. 

YACHT, 553. 

Yacht Flag of United States, 
243- 

Yale College, Telescope of, 
614. 

Yam, 660. 

Yards of Ship, 551. 

Yarn, Rope, 521. 

Yawl, 522. 

Year, Meaning of a, 631. 
Yeast, 660. 

Yellow Bird, 660. 

Yellow Pine, 467. 

Yellow Rose, 521. 

Yolk of Egg, 203. 

ZANTE CURRANTS, 506. 
Zebra, 379, 661. 

Zig-zag Lightning, 356. 
Zinc, 661. 

| Zither, 620. 



















































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